Getting Acquainted, Part IV: Baptism
by Sevenstars
Summary: When Jess's past comes back at him once again, it's up Daisy and Mike to help.


**Getting Acquainted, Part IV: Baptism**

 _by Sevenstars_

SUMMARY: Things get complicated for Jess and Daisy when they're left in charge of the ranch for a while. Begins just under a week after the events of Part III, "The Texan and the Lady." Katy, who beta'd the previous chapters, graciously did this one too.

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 **The Stockmen's Palace Saloon, Laramie, Saturday afternoon:**

"I ain't plumb sure this was such a good notion after all, Slim." Jess's voice had that familiar uneasy tone that meant he either knew he'd made a first-class blunder or was about to start running himself down for something or other.

"You were the one who suggested it," Slim observed mildly.

"I know that! You figure I don't know that? It's just—" and here the Texan's eyebrows assumed the oblique angle that Slim privately thought of as _lost-little-boy-complete-with-puppy_ — "I always reckoned I could count on you to catch me when I come up with somethin' clean loco."

Startled by this unusually frank admission of his best friend's utter faith and trust in him—he knew it was there, but most often it was expressed in looks or smiles, or more circuitously, like the time he'd sent Ben to carry the word of his capture by Sam Jarrad—Slim took a moment to study the younger man carefully. "It can't be that she's a woman," he said then. "Most of the women in these parts can shoot—certainly all the ones who live on the ranches, and some of the homesteads too. Celie McCaskey can shoot better than you." It wasn't quite true—Celie had only outshot Jess twice, once at the spring rodeo and again, at the recent Fourth of July match, by half an inch, after four tied rounds; and those had been with a rifle—but winning a match was still winning a match.

Uncharacteristically, Jess didn't try to excuse his performance. "No, that ain't it. She should learn. What with snakes and coyotes and drifters and Indians, and you and me sometimes out on the range or workin' for Mort or somethin', it's only right. It's—" he looked down at the weapon that lay on the table between them, its belt lapped around the narrow holster in a gentle embrace— "I just don't feel right teachin' a lady to use a handgun. Not even _that_ handgun."

" _That_ handgun" was the 1839-model Colt Paterson that had been Slim's first revolver, an inheritance from Joey Redhawk, the Comanche-Chickasaw teenager who had been, briefly, his best friend on his first trail drive up from Texas with his father, more than fifteen years ago. He'd replaced it with a Remington when he went off to enlist in the war, and it had been stowed away in a trunk in the attic ever since. He would never have gotten rid of it; his memory of his "pard-ship" with Joey, his first-ever experience of that kind of relationship, was still very special to him. Without it, indeed, he might never have understood just what was growing between him and Jess.

The Paterson was, or had been originally, a .34-caliber five-shooter, with an octagonal nine-and-a-half-inch barrel, an overall length of thirteen and a half inches, and an approximate weight of two and three-quarter pounds. Like all handguns made before the introduction of the self-firing cartridge, back in the '50's, it had been loaded with loose powder, patch, and ball, or later with paper, cloth, or foil cartridges containing a pre-measured amount of powder, but always with a copper percussion cap packed with fulminate of mercury, which provided the necessary spark to ignite the powder. If this wasn't done properly—or sometimes even if it was, because of the fulminate—all the chambers could go off at once in a "chainfire" that could cause severe injury or even death. Moreover, loading by this process was a time-consuming job that could mean life or death in a fight situation (which was why, during the war, some men had carried two, four, even six handguns, and pre-loaded extra cylinders for them too), and there was additionally really only one way to effectively unload the weapon—by firing it. When one-piece brass-jacket cartridges came in, many people, rather than laying out fifteen or twenty dollars for an entirely new gun, had preferred to find a way to convert the old ones to accept the new ammunition, and as always happens, demand created supply and various means of doing so were quickly developed.

It had been Jess's idea to have the thirty-plus-year-old Paterson updated for Daisy to learn to use, and like many such conversions, it had been done locally, by Laramie's resident gunsmith, with little more than a miniature forge and an array of hand tools; otherwise it would have had to be shipped back to the factory, and setting aside the time, and probable extra expense, involved in that, Slim hadn't been at all sure they'd have been willing to do it, not on such an early model. The process was pretty much the same either way: the cylinder had to be altered or replaced by one with a new breech face; the loading lever, or rammer, no longer needed to seat round balls over the powder charge, had to be removed from beneath the barrel and replaced by an ejector rod and housing on the right side to push the spent cartridge brass backwards out of the cylinder. The former of these most often involved cutting off the back of the original cylinder, with the nipples on which the caps had been put, and replacing it with a conversion ring—simply stated, a disc with holes in it through which to insert the sealed metallic cartridges. The hammer was then modified by adding a firing pin to hit the primer, and a loading gate, hinged to swing out, was added in the right-hand recoil shield. Generally it was also necessary to add a rear sight, and the cylinder, if the original one was kept, was re-bored to take .36 or .38 Navy rounds, of which the former weighed eighty-one grains apiece and were powered by twenty-two of powder—slightly less than a quarter of an ounce per—so that the Paterson, converted and fully charged, now weighed in at just about two pounds thirteen ounces. The whole job cost only five or six dollars.

Slim had never really seriously considered any possibility but that Jess would be the one to teach Daisy to use it. Of the two of them, he was, of course, much the better with a handgun; after all, he'd earned his living with one, until he'd landed here. And he was a natural teacher, as Slim knew from having watched him with Andy and, more recently, Mike.

But now, it seemed, Slim's pard was having very serious second thoughts.

Well aware that it was much better to lead Jess than to drive him, Slim decided to play his hole card. "Well," he said slowly, "if that's the way you feel, it's valid for you, and I'll need to take over. But I'm afraid it'll have to wait—two weeks, three, maybe as much as a month."

The angle of those eloquent eyebrows changed. "How come? This ain't busy season. Stock's up on the mountain—we still got to go up and check on 'em, time to time, but all the neighbors're takin' their turn at that too—Bill Bates, the Miller boys, Old Man Morgan and his sons, Jim Lonsdale."

Slim toyed with the handle of his schooner of beer. "Didn't you wonder why I wanted to come here—" nodding around at the barroom— "after we picked up the gun?"

"To wait till Miss Daisy got the shoppin' done, I reckoned," Jess replied.

"Not quite. Remember when I rode over to Reed's place, last Monday?"

"Yeah, sure," Jess agreed at once. "That was the day you took Mike along and I taught Miss Daisy all about rattlers and poison oak."

"Oh, is _that_ what you were doing!" said Slim with a grin. "I thought you were yarning."

"When _you_ got back, yeah, I was. Not before." Returning to his previous line of thought: "What's it got to do with you not bein' able to give her handgun lessons?"

"Reed wants me to run for County Commissioner," Slim told him.

Jess looked as if that was about the last thing he'd expected to hear—and, at that, perhaps it was. Certainly Slim had never expected the offer to be made to him. "Why?"

Slim shrugged. "Seems one of the current ones wants to retire—from his business _and_ the Board—and spend more time with his grandchildren. When Reed sent for me to come by, I figured maybe it had something to do with our shared boundary. But when I got there, that day, Cole Rogers was there too. He and Reed pretty much run the party in these parts, and they think I'll make the perfect candidate. Trouble is, the stage line knows me, and the people right around Laramie, but there's a lot more to Albany County than just that." Which was true. When the Territory of Wyoming had first been created, only two years ago—cobbled together out of tracts of land that had originally belonged to Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Dakota, Nebraska, and Utah—it had been divided into only five counties, each reaching from the Montana line in the north nearly three hundred miles to the Colorado and Utah borders in the south: from west to east, Uintah, Sweetwater, Carbon, Albany, and Laramie. That meant each of them sprawled over something like seventeen thousand square miles or more, mostly sparsely inhabited; their own Albany was more than fifty miles across. "So I'm going to have to campaign. Go around the county, meet people, shake hands, make speeches, that kind of thing. And I have to do it now, while the weather's good and—as you said—we're not caught up in the busy season. When it gets closer to election time, it'll be too late; I'll have to be here, running our share of the fall roundup and getting the place ready for winter with you, bringing in wood, checking the roofs and all."

"How you figure to work it?" Jess asked.

"Reed's volunteered to manage my campaign. He and Celie and I will be taking a swing through the county, starting Monday. That was why I wanted us to come here, so we could talk more or less privately, and I could tell you before I do Mike or Daisy."

"Celie's goin'?" Jess's eyebrows took flight again.

Slim shrugged. "She reminded her pa that women vote in Wyoming, and they might like to hear a woman's impression of his candidate."

Jess snorted. "Don't sound much like her kind of thing, but Reed don't say no to her no matter what she comes up with." He was silent a moment, working out the implications of the plan in his mind. "So I'll be in charge at home, then."

"You'll have to be," Slim agreed. "The stages will still be running, and there are horses to break, and Nils and his hay crew are due on Thursday to start cutting the alfalfa; somebody's got to be here to look after all that."

Jess looked at the Paterson again. "And that."

"Yeah. I really don't think we should leave it till I can get back from this campaign, Jess. What happened in Jubilee should be enough to prove that to both of us. If you hadn't been there with her… there's no telling what might have happened. It's not as if she'd had a derringer in her reticule, like a lot of women out here." A pause, then: "There's a saying I remember hearing somewhere: _The person best suited to a task is honor-bound to accept it._ When it comes to handguns, I think that's you. If the day ever comes that Andy or Mike have to learn, you're the one I want to take them in hand, because I know you'll teach them not only _how_ , but _why_ and _when_. The same's true of Daisy, only maybe more so, because she's so new here. This country sort of attracts some of the best men and some of the worst. Being from the East, it'll take her a while to tell the difference."

Jess was silent a moment, pondering on that; then he sighed. "I reckon so. It's just… I'd hoped I'd left all that behind, y'know? I never looked to be in the trade… it just kind of come on me, with Bannister and all."

"I know," Slim agreed quietly. "Only—I don't think anyone ever actually does leave his past completely behind, Jess. I don't think he can, because our pasts are what make our present selves. And maybe I'm being selfish, but I sort of hope you never do, because… well, I've gotten used to knowing there's a gun at my side that I can always depend on."

Jess took a sip of his beer. "Did kinda seem like you was chewin' on some tough jerky, since you come back from Reed's," he observed. "Miss Daisy don't know you well enough yet t'ask, and Mike, well, he's a kid, but…"

"—But _you_ knew," Slim finished. This was one of the things he loved best about Jess: his perception and his unselfish caring. He could be tempery, mule-stubborn, incredibly aggravating (especially when convalescent), he could explode in violence if pushed too hard. But if he cared about you, if he had accepted you into his world, the constant sensitivity to his surroundings that had had so big a share in his survival those ten long years guaranteed that he would know when you were troubled, or trying to work your way through a difficult problem, or make an important choice. He would know, and he would be there, quietly, not pushing, letting you work on it at your own speed and in your own way, but ready, if you asked, to offer support, opinions, or simply someone to talk to.

"Yeah," said Jess. Then: "Are you plumb sure this is somethin' you want to do, pard? I recollect Jonesy tellin' me one time that you'd never wanted to be nothin' but a rancher, same as your pa had."

"I did. I do," Slim agreed. "I've been thinking a lot about it, this last week. I know I feel that what I do—what _we_ do—is important, necessary, and—to me—deeply satisfying, especially now that you're here to help me and I feel as if I've turned a corner, put the struggling times behind me. And yet… I've thought, too, of how many times we've put the ranch work aside for a while, to help Mort or the line. Those things are more—I don't know—outwardly directed, more community-based, than what we do day to day. So, even being a rancher, I've never been _only_ a rancher. Maybe it's time I… broadened that involvement. Pa was the kind of man who'd never turn down a call for help from anyone as long as he had anything to give. Maybe I'm just being like him, as I've always been. I don't know for certain, in my own mind, that I'm suited for it, or can succeed at it—but I think I want to try."

"Tryin's what a man does," Jess murmured, "and keeps on doin', till he can't no more." He sounded as if he were quoting something he'd heard somewhere, as Slim had earlier. Then he looked toward the big round-faced clock on the wall behind the bar. "And we best be meetin' Miss Daisy and Mike, it's close on three." He gulped down the last of his beer, and when Slim reached for the old revolver in its holster, his hand was there first. "No, I'll take it. If I'm gonna be the one teachin' her—"

Slim reached out and gripped his friend's forearm. "Thanks, pard. I always knew I could count on you. I always can."

They had been so absorbed in their own concerns that neither of them—not even Jess, who was usually almost hypersensitive to his surroundings, a holdover from his gunfighting days—had noticed the man lounging at a corner table behind last week's _Laramie Gazette,_ perhaps because he'd been doing exactly that, and not being obtrusive about his interest in them. As the batwing doors slapped shut behind them, he pushed to his feet and ambled casually in their wake, pausing under the awning to extract a silver cigar case from an inner pocket, remove a black truncated "negro cheroot," scratch a match on the nearest post and puff the smoke into life as his eyes followed their oblique course across Front Street to Watkins's store. He watched the small boy in the long, slightly flared, fine-striped trousers and drop-shouldered, button-cuffed calico shirt launch himself off the store porch to be scooped up in the taller man's arms, swung dizzyingly around, and passed expertly on to the dark-haired one, watched the white-blonde woman in the lilac-colored summer dress and straw sailor hat administer what was probably a laughing rebuke, watched as the dark-haired man plopped the boy down in the middle of the seat of the loaded buckboard waiting at the rack and climbed up alongside him; watched the taller man circle around to hand the woman up on the boy's other side, then unsnap the anchor weight that held the team, swing it over the side of the bed, and mount the chestnut horse standing at the rack. He followed the buckboard with his eyes as the dark-haired man snapped the reins across the team's back and the chestnut's rider fell in alongside, the whole party heading up Front Street toward the line of evergreens at the top of the slope, just beyond Dennison's feed barn.

**SR**

 **On the road, Tuesday morning:**

"I'm still not sure this is a good idea, Reed," Slim confessed, thinking privately that he was sounding not too different from the way Jess had on Saturday. "I've never really thought about getting into politics."

"You should," retorted Reed McCaskey. "It's the way a man gets ahead, in a Territory. I knew your pa, liked and respected him, and if any man's son deserves to get ahead, it's you. No—" he held up a hand to forestall comment— "look at it the way we do. You're good-lookin' and well-spoken, you've got energy, you have the reputation of being honest and a hard worker. Those are things folks want in the men they elect to office, or say they do, though by Godfrey you wouldn't always know it, to judge by the ones they seem to be sendin' to Washington these days. On the Board of Commissioners you can get your feet wet and see whether elective office really suits you, without having to give over too much of your time or get into a lot of factional fightin'. Spend two or three terms there, maybe you can move on. Territorial legislature, or if that's too big a step, mayor of Laramie. Then—who knows? One of these days they'll have to make us a state. We'll need a treasurer, a lieutenant-governor, a governor even. And Senators and Representatives to send East…"

Slim knew, as he'd already told Jess, that Reed was something of a power in local politics; he was not only a considerable cattleman—his tally this spring had run to somewhat over 3100 head, which put him solidly into the class generally called "middling;" not as large as Cole Rogers's Double Circle, but his long history in the Laramie Basin made up for it—but an early settler and respected as such. Now that Herb Wilson was dead, and Bob focused on building up the ranch and keeping the bank on an even keel, he had, with Rogers, about the biggest voice in the selection of candidates from either party, both town- and county-level—ranchers needed good people running the town where they traded.

"I don't know if I can spare the time to give the job the kind of attention it deserves," Slim observed. "I've got a ranch to run, a boy to raise…"

"That's just why the Board's the best place for you to start," McCaskey replied. "Mostly it's about lookin' after the roads, readin' the sheriff's monthly report, and decidin' on the tax rates. It don't take up such a lot of a man's life, maybe one meeting every month, plus keepin' an eye on the weather once it comes snow season—and you get paid for your trouble; not much, only $120 a year, but that's at least enough to pay Jess four months of his wages."

Slim swallowed a reply. That idea resonated with him. The first year Jess had been here, there'd been two or three times Slim had had to postpone paying him when money got tight. Jess had never complained—as long as he had even a few dollars in his pocket, he could always find a penny- or nickel-ante poker game and win more—but Slim had always hated to do it; he knew, by then, just how much he owed Jess, and more, how much he wanted him to stay on. Still, with a mortgage to pay on, supplies to buy, taxes, clothes for the ever-growing Andy, sometimes it just had to get pushed down to the end of the line. Thank the Lord, they had the loan paid off now, thanks chiefly to Jess unselfishly throwing his quarter of the reward on Morgan Bennett into the pot.

"That's another thing," Slim said after a moment. "I hate leaving Jess to run everything all by himself. It's not that I don't think he can, it's just… doing it because of politics seems unfair, somehow."

"Jess'll be okay," McCaskey assured him comfortably. "Not like he'll have such an awful lot to do. Most of your stock's up on the mountain for the summer, so he don't have to ride fence or such as that, and Nils Langenberg and his boys can cut your hay without him lookin' over their shoulders." Langenberg owned an assortment of agricultural machinery that was too costly for most homesteaders and not worth the bother of buying for the generality of ranchers, including the biggest horse-drawn rake in the Laramie Basin—it could do the work of twenty men—and a mechanical hay-baler that could turn out six dozen thirty-pound bales in a day, and he hired them out, usually for a share of the harvest, together with a work crew composed partly of his sons and partly of whoever he could get for the busy season. Like most Swedes, he was a diligent, hard-working sort, strongly Republican and without outward levity or humor, but also blessed with an innate ability for the care of machinery, which enabled him to keep everything running satisfactorily. "Mostly he'll have the stages to look after, horses to break—which is the part of the job he loves—and maybe some maintenance chores around the place, fixin' up here and there."

"I guess so," Slim allowed. "I just… you know how he tends to get into spots. I guess I worry about him when I'm not around to back him up." _Like that time with Warren Hamry_ , he thought, remembering the long search for his fugitive friend afterward. Then, changing back to the previous subject: "If you're so hipped on politics, Reed, why didn't you ever get into it yourself?"

"If they'd made us a Territory twenty years ago, maybe I would have," the older man replied. "But, on the other hand, maybe I wouldn't—had a herd to build back then, and a flock of little girls to raise." Reed had first settled in the Basin in 1849, and he and his wife Lillian, who was twenty-three years younger, had had, at the time, three daughters, aged seven, four, and ten months; the youngest had arrived two years later. "Now… well, I'm gettin' on; I'm five years older than your pa would be, if he'd lived, and I've got five boys to teach the cow business to. I figure maybe a dozen years more to do that in; Joe'll be thirty, probably married, and he can take over the ranch and look after his brothers if they need it—even David'll be seventeen. I don't want to waste whatever time I've got left at political business."

"Oh, Pa," put in his youngest girl, Celie, "don't talk like that. You'll live to be ninety, at least, and dance at David's wedding. Why, Carolyn might even give you a great-grand or two by then." Carolyn was the oldest of the girls, a thirty-year-old widow running her late husband's spread outside Cheyenne, with two young sons.

Celie at twenty-one had a face much like her father's, aquiline but lacking any sharp angularity, strong without the severe line of his blunt jaw; her copper-red hair exactly matched the darker strands in his shaggy gray head. She wore her almost unvarying outfit, a big, gaudily striped bandanna, long leather gauntlets, deep-necked checkered cotton blouse and buckskin riding skirt, and held the reins of the buckboard team with unmistakable competence. In the back of the bed was a cowhide trunk and a saddle (hers), two leather satchels (Slim's and her father's), three thirty-pound bedrolls, a small tent (to save Celie's privacy) and an assortment of camping gear and food, in case they got caught on the trail between houses around sunset. Tethered on behind the vehicle was her favorite horse, a blaze-faced, white-footed buckskin, and her Winchester rode in a boot fastened to the side of the buckboard, within easy reach of her right hand.

Reed had been a trapper in his youth—one of the first of the "mountain men" of the '20's and '30's; he was, as he sometimes observed, "just a year older than the century," but still imposing with his ramrod-straight carriage and meticulous dress, lined handsome face and piercing blue eyes. Though a cattleman now, he retained a certain taste for flamboyance in his clothing, probably the influence of the Indians among whom he had moved for so many years—a silver-gray beaver hat whose shape wouldn't have been out of place on the streets of Philadelphia or New York, embellished with a broad, blazing-bright Indian-beaded band; a fringed, beaded buckskin jacket hanging open over his fine dark-blue flannel shirt and antelope vest, and buckskin gauntlets whose flaring cuffs were decorated with fancy geometric designs, centered by his Tumbling R Block brand enclosed by a circle. His dark serge trousers were tucked into shiny black boots with handsome white stitching. He still carried the trapper's best friend, a Green River knife with a heavy, slightly curved ten-inch blade, sheathed on the back of his gunbelt, hilt turned rightward so he could reach it easily. Secure enough in his status as one of the Territory's earliest ranchers to not follow the common cowboy prejudice against riding anything but geldings, and further influenced by the frequent use of mares as war mounts by the tribesmen, he bestrode a long-legged, hard-mouthed, blue-black racking one of mostly Kentucky breeding, with the temper of a fiend and the paces of an airy wandering seraph.

Sunlight spilled over the road and the prairie that rolled away to either side of it, and big fair-weather clouds sailed through the sky like galleons. These brief summer months were about the only time a candidate could spare for in-person campaigning, assuming he was also a cattleman, as most seekers of any office not entirely town-based might well be. By the first of September Slim would have to be preparing for roundup; after that would be the annual trail drive to Cheyenne; then the three-day blowout of Roundup Day, and then the frantic succession of jobs connected to "making the place winter-ready." By the time that was finished, Election Day could well have been and gone. In that, at least, Slim knew he was fortunate: he might not be able to do any campaigning himself over the last couple of months of the season, but Reed could. Though he looked twenty years younger than his actual seventy-three, and every year heretofore had pulled his fair share of the work in both the spring and fall gathers, he could, if necessary, leave his affairs to be overseen by his foreman—and Celie, who was quite capable of acting as "the main rod" of Tumbling R Block if she had to. That would give Reed time to campaign on Slim's behalf (even if the only people he got to talk to were town dwellers and ranchers' wives), besides flooding the county with broadsides and other political propaganda. They'd discussed the whole question the first day; McCaskey had already thought ahead (as he usually did) and guessed at Slim's objections to the whole idea, and had been prepared to meet them.

Despite its size, more than half of Albany County, including most of what lay above the North Platte River, was pretty much Indian country, and barely touched by white expansion: the Powder River Basin, which technically enclosed a good part of the former and extended north almost to Billings, east to the spine of the Black Hills and west to that of the Big Horn Mountains, sprawled across some 24,000 square miles—a tenth the size of France—and was still controlled by the Sioux. If Slim had been trying for this same position in Carbon or Sweetwater County, he'd have had a much longer swing to make: ever since Jim Bridger blazed his eponymous trail up through the Big Horn Valley back in '64, following it and keeping west of the Big Horns, in Shoshoni country, had been touted as the best way to keep your hair—even though part of it was disputed with the Crow, they were at least friendly toward the newcomers—and, as always happens where people pass through, some of them stopped and squatted, so that the valley was slowly being brought into the orbit of civilization.

All the same, the route Reed had mapped out was nothing to sneeze at. It looped over some 450 miles of trail, from Bosler through Casper, Fort Fetterman, Medicine Bow, Rock River, Arlington, Tie Siding, and Buford, and on back to Laramie. And since they'd probably have to stop at every ranch and farm along the way, as well as in the towns, you had to figure that even with the buckboard, which could do sixty miles in a day if it had good ground, they'd have to take around three weeks to complete the trip. Slim sighed to himself. He was half beginning to regret going along with his father's old friend; he was a homebody by nature and honestly preferred his own stomping grounds, his ranch and the nearby range and Laramie, to any other place.

Casper would be their first major stop, a bit over 150 miles by road from Laramie. Many Western towns began by a process of accretion to an existing military post; its establishment created an immediate market for hay, grain, firewood, cattle, horses, mules, hogs, and fresh produce, and ranches and farms were started nearby as soon as it seemed "safe"—which, with the Army within a couple of hours' hard riding, was likely to be very early on. In some isolated areas, their only market was the fort.

Troops had been stationed at the site—a Mormon ferry over the North Platte from June of '47, a thousand-foot bridge twelve years later—ever since late July, 1858, a time at which the Northern tribes, particularly the Sioux, had been growing increasingly restive and hostile. In May of '62 a detachment of the Sixth U.S. Volunteers—one of the outfits of "galvanized Yankees," former Confederate prisoners of war—had been placed there to protect the bridge and the telegraph line. By that time, owing partly to the Army presence and partly to that of the crossing— fords, springs, junctions, and other natural stopping places with water supply and pasturage frequently served as the nucleus of towns—settlers were already fairly thick on the ground, trading with Oregon- and California-bound wagoneers as well as the military, and the spot had become a regular layover for these and for the freighters heading for Utah and the Montana mining country. All of which had inspired the establishment of a few civilian stores just off the reservation to provide them with things like powder and salt and calico that they couldn't produce for themselves, together with a blacksmithy, a wagonwright, and a harnessmaker to do needed repairs and refits before the wagon trains struck out for the rougher mountain country—and, inevitably, facilities where the soldiers could blow their pay when they got it.

The post had become permanent in the spring of '65, and was named Fort Caspar—often misspelled Casper in government reports—late the same fall. Two years later it was abandoned in favor of Fort Fetterman. But the civilians, too rooted to want to move, stayed on and, headed up by Arnold DeWalt, made up a pool of money and bought the old facility—fifteen and a half acres within the stockade—and the surrounding three hundred or so from the government. It only cost $400 to withdraw a half-section from the Federal domain, so it wasn't much of a burden financially to any individual household, and under the Townsite Act of 1867, any group of 100 or more settlers could form a "township company" by obtaining a charter from the state or Territorial legislature, issue stock in whatever amount and at whatever price made sense to them, and hire an engineer to plat the proposed town. DeWalt and his group called their speculation Casper, retaining the military's erroneous spelling, and got it patented as soon as the Territory was organized. The Indians from the Powder country still gave them trouble, but Fetterman wasn't far away, less than sixty miles downstream, and its patrols passed through frequently.

Fetterman too had begun to serve as a nucleus for settlement, its town being known as Douglas, and Slim was to visit both places, as well as the fort, for while soldiers didn't vote in local or Territorial elections—only national ones and, by way of absentee ballot, those in their communities of origin—the C.O. of necessity was someone the Commissioners had to maintain good relations with, and there was always a small civilian community present as well: the post trader and his employees, the contract surgeons, teamsters, and others attached to the place, and at minimum contractors supplying hay, wood, and beef, plus men working for them, though many of those were floaters.

And that reminded him. "We might want to step a little soft when we get up to Casper," he suggested. "I had… a sort of run-in with Arnold DeWalt, a couple of years ago. You'll have heard of him. He's a power up there—about what you or Cole or Vic Prescott are down our way."

Reed slanted a curious look at him. "Can't have been boundaries or such as that, he's way too far north to have any quarrel with you."

Slim glanced uneasily in Celie's direction. Like most range girls, she was frank and plain-spoken, not inclined to delicacy or prudery, but still, he wasn't sure he wanted to recount the details of Laurel DeWalt's antics in her hearing, especially since he was more than half convinced—and knew Reed was too—that she was, if not exactly in love with Jess, certainly interested in him; she just didn't show it the way most girls would. If he was honest with himself, Slim wasn't at all sure he'd ever succeed in finding a woman who suited him, but he would dearly like to see Jess do it. Jess needed a family; the way he'd bonded with the people at Sherman Ranch proved that. He needed to start one of his own, to recreate something of what he'd lost all those years ago to the Bannisters. And he wasn't a man to be happy with a woman who'd mother him or try to domesticate him or need to be looked after all the time. He'd need someone who wouldn't distract him with worries about her safety; who'd be as loyal to him as he was to anyone he accepted into his life; who could fend for herself, protect herself and their children if she had to, and only be afraid when there was good reason to be; who'd stand up to him when he was wrong, defend her own views, and face everything the frontier had to throw at a family, without flinching or shrinking or claiming exemptions just because she was a woman. Celie, for all her faults (and she had her share, but then so did Jess!), was that kind of woman. Slim didn't want to prejudice her against his best friend simply because Jess had once been bewitched by a beautiful, ruthless female. "Jess worked for him once, before he came to us," he said slowly, feeling his way. "Later part of that… came back on him, the first year he was here. And I took his part; I had to. It ended up with DeWalt pulled into the situation, and a couple of men who were working for him—not crew, just casual hires—got shot. I don't know the man well, mostly just his reputation, but if he's any kind of cowman at all… a proper rancher stands by his men, as I did by Jess. He might hold a grudge against either or both of us."

Reed thought that over for a minute. "Well, I'm glad you told me before we ended up in his foreyard," he said then. "It'll be close to a week till we get up there; I'll think on it. He knows me, and we respect each other, though I'm nowhere near his weight in Territorial affairs. Maybe I can just ride over there alone and have a talk with him."

Reading between the lines, Slim guessed that the older man would either do a little asking around when they came to Casper, or brace DeWalt with the question himself, and try to get a better handle on whatever he could tell Slim wasn't saying. That was all right, then. Reed approved of Jess, even though Jess had yet to do anything that could have been interpreted as courting his favorite daughter. And he had a mountain man's practicality about man/woman matters; if he got the details, he wouldn't be scandalized, and he wouldn't let Celie be either. "All right," Slim agreed. "It doesn't matter much to me whether I get elected or not, but still… you seem to think I'd do a good job, and if DeWalt were to decide to throw his influence against me, I wouldn't have much show."

McCaskey grinned suddenly. "Thinkin' of things like that's what you have a campaign manager for, son."

**SR**

 **Sherman Ranch, the same day:**

"But aren't they terribly heavy?" Daisy asked, eyeing the two guns—Jess's walnut-handled "working" .44 and the Paterson—with a dubious expression.

"Not as much as you think," he told her. "Now if I was packin' one of them old Walkers or Dragoons, like Slim's pa done—yeah, they had a good heft on 'em, better'n four pound. But these here… even loaded, they ain't either one as heavy as a number-five cast-iron skillet—and you handle Jonesy's old ten-incher right good. Here, gi'me your hand." He took it in his own right, spreading her fingers gently, and fitted the Paterson into her palm, settling the heel of her hand against the curve of the butt, showing her how to position her grip. "It's a little bit longer'n my gun, or Slim's," he proceeded as he did so. "But it ain't got as strong a recoil, 'cause Navy slugs is lighter'n .44 and don't need so much powder to kick 'em out; these ain't but a little more'n half the powder charge as we use. And we had the balance worked on, moved the ballast back a little; Colt guns've got a way of bein' a mite heavy on the business end. Handgun's gotta have some weight, though, to soak up the recoil—this'n weighs more'n mine, likely on account it ain't but five shots, and that means they didn't have to drill as much metal out of it when they made the cylinder."

A look of surprise came over her face as he slowly and carefully released his grip on her hand, letting her support the Paterson's weight alone. "Yes, I can feel it. You're right, dear. It's easier to hold than any of the frying pans we have in the kitchen."

"'Course it is," Jess agreed, grinning. "That's 'cause you ain't got most of the weight four-five inches out ahead of you; it's at the center of gravity, snugged up in your hand. Now, bein' lighter on the powder, it won't carry a shot as far as a .44 would. But if the situation ever comes up, most likely you'll be at pretty close range, so it won't matter. Some ways it'll be easier. A .44 slug'll go as far as a thousand yards, but you got to aim high in the air, and for hundreds of yards of trajectory the bullet's gonna be 'way above the target. That's why you got to learn to judge your distances; if you're shootin' at a rider, say, that you figure to be three hundred yards away, and he's really only two hundred and fifty, you'll miss. Same thing's true at shorter ranges; the margin ain't so big, but a missed shot, even only by a quarter of an inch, is still a missed shot, and don't do you no good at all. When I was learnin' the trade, Dixie told me that a person judges range by blendin' two views together—right eye and left. Up to around four hundred eighty yards, which is just over a quarter of a mile, with practice, your brain'll automatically triangulate and tell you the distance. Six to seven is the minimum range of the relaxed human eye; that's why short-range shots don't often miss."

She listened attentively; having had occasion to see him in action, she understood instinctively that he was speaking as the expert he was. "Now," he went on, reaching over again to show her how to position her thumb, "it ain't hard at all. You draw the hammer back… so, that's it—till you hear it click on the sear; now it's cocked. You keep a good grip—if you drop it when it's like that, it'll go off sure, and you could shoot yourself in the foot—I've seen it happen. Okay—" he took a quick look to the left to assure himself that curious Mike was staying back by two or three feet, out of the line of fire— "let's give it a try. I'd a lot sooner you could shoot from the hip like I do, but just startin' out, and green at this like you are, maybe best you do it the way them duelists do down South. Bring it up slow… that's it… keep your eye on the target, ma'am, not the gun, it ain't the gun you're aimin' to hit." He nodded briefly toward the line of billets of firewood that he'd stood up on end on the top rail of the corral, six or seven feet away. "Pick your target and hold the gun steady, both hands, like you'd do with a hot skillet. Keep your thumb away from that hammer now it's set. You'll notice there ain't no trigger guard on this, like on modern ones. It's what they call a sheathed trigger, it don't pop out till the hammer cocks. Makes it some easier to fire, 'cause you don't got to grope around. Now bring it up… easy… _now!"_

The Paterson went off with the light, rather sharp bang of a Navy-caliber load, kicking back in Daisy's hands and fetching a startled gasp from her. The bullet went whining off to the left of the targets and toward the trees on the lower slope of the ridge; where it went Jess couldn't tell.

"Aw, shoot," he muttered. "Reckon I forgot to warn you. Like you said, it ain't too heavy for you, but a skillet don't come back against your hand like that. But then, most folks miss a lot in the beginnin'. Takes gettin' used to, like 'most anything new. Reckon when you was learnin' to sew, you stuck your finger more'n once, huh?"

She laughed uneasily. "That was a good many years ago, dear."

"Don't mean it didn't happen," he said, his lopsided grin bringing out the dimples and crinkling his midnight eyes. "Okay, let's try again. Take a firmer grip. Now you know it does that, you'll be readier for it. Same thing happened to me, when I was a kid."

"Who taught _you_ , Jess?" Mike inquired.

"My pa," the Texan replied. "Sundays when he'd let the crew have the day off, we'd work on it, startin' soon as my hand was big enough. I'd just turned twelve." Back to Daisy: "No, ma'am, don't stiffen up. You keep your wrist rigid like that, the kick'll be worse. Look." He took the old gun back, keeping his thumb off the hammer and showing her how he could move his wrist up and down while still retaining a firm grip wrapped around the butt. "You got to take that recoil with a kinda flip, level the gun for the next shot in case one's needed. Hold in mind, this here's light caliber. A .44 slug can knock a man down if it takes him when he ain't ready for it, though if he's mad and comin' at you it can take a good three rounds to put him down, sometimes more. This here, like I said, it ain't got the powder load, so it don't hit so hard."

Daisy watched the movements of his hand, studying the flex and angle of his wrist with the knowledge gained by her years as a volunteer nurse in the field hospitals. "I think I understand," she said after a moment, her tone firm. "Let me try again."

He grinned again; this was turning out easier than he'd feared. "Okay. Here you go. Put your hand like you had it before… so… now, eyes on the target… thumb up, pull the hammer back…"

Bang! This time the shot went wild the other way; Jess heard the dull thud of the bullet chunking into the siding of the barn. Daisy heard it too, and what was more she understood what it was. "Oh, my," she said. "Jess, dear, I don't think I'll ever be able to do this. Can't you teach me to use the shotgun instead? At least it has a barrel that I could rest on a windowsill."

"Yeah, it does, but it's also got a kick like a mule," Jess told her. "You'd be lucky if it didn't knock you flat on—well, flat, the first time you let go with it. Plus, this here's a good size to hide somewheres in the house; if anybody caught you by surprise you might still be able to get to it. Couldn't do that with the shotgun; they'd see it and get it out of your reach." He looked at her in puzzlement. "It ain't that you're scared of guns—I saw that in Jubilee. Is it the noise?"

"No, of course not," Daisy told him. "It's no more than a firecracker compared to some of the cannonades I heard when I was working at the field hospital."

Jess remembered Slim's speculations about that experience. "Close to the front?" he guessed.

"Practically at it, more than once," she agreed. "Dear Clara and I—Clara Barton; I knew her in the early '50's, when she was operating a free school in Bordentown, New Jersey, just across the river from Philadelphia; she came over to Chester County to visit friends once or twice, and we moved in some of the same circles—Clara and I were the ones in charge of the nursing corps there, for almost three years. I suppose," she added thoughtfully, "that it's the prospect of actually shooting _at_ someone. I understand that you feel it may be necessary, you and Slim, but—I saw so many young men hurt or dying… I know something of the kind of pain they went through, and I hate to think of inflicting it."

"It ain't fun," he said solemnly. "But there's times you got to. Dixie told me that, and he was right. A man that kills when he don't got to is plumb crazy, but when he does got to—to protect his home, or them he cares about… it's okay then. Anyways it's the lesser of two evils, I reckon." It wasn't a thing he would have said to most other women—not even a range-bred one like Celie McCaskey. He found himself wondering at how it was between them, how quickly he had trusted her. It had taken him nearly a year to bring himself to tell Slim the whole story of Bannister and what had become of his family—even though by then he had already known inside himself that this was the brother Wolf Sleeping had dreamed he would find—and he might not have done it then if Trim Stuart hadn't shown up at the ranch looking for a tracker to help him run Bannister down after the outlaw broke out of the Territorial Prison. Yet he had told Daisy the painful tale after knowing her less than a month. It made him feel almost disloyal to Slim. But on the other hand, if he hadn't told it once to Slim, he might never have been able to tell it to Daisy, so maybe it was all right. Still, that he had warmed to her so early amazed him.

He'd never expected to bond with anyone ever again, not after he'd lost his family. He'd had trail-partners and friends, but none of his team-ups had ever lasted—he hadn't really expected them to; the longest had been the one with Dixie, two years and some. He'd come to believe that he'd spend whatever time was left to him essentially alone, and then he'd drifted into Sherman Ranch. He hadn't planned to stay, Andy's enthusiastic welcome notwithstanding; he'd understood keenly enough that both Jonesy and Slim had reservations about him. Even after Slim hired him on, for a good three weeks he'd kept rehearsing in his head all the reasons he had to go. And then there'd been the shoot-out at the stage office in town, and suddenly he'd been one of the family—not only to Andy but to the two men. And he'd realized that he wanted it so. It had taken him a long time to understand that it was really real, and even now he sometimes found it incredible that people would want him around for who he was, as opposed to what he could do, with a gun or otherwise. Indeed he had often been troubled by a genuine fear that Slim would drive him away, whether because of his past and the trouble that often followed him, or because of their very real differences in outlook and ethics. Yet he realized, now, that these were his people—not only people who'd made him theirs, but a new family. This was home.

He'd missed Andy terribly, had stayed partly because he knew Slim felt the same way. Mike coming had made everything new again, right, complete—or so he'd figured. He knew now that they'd been needing one more thing, and now they had it. "Let's try again," he said briskly. "Don't get discouraged, ma'am, you ain't hardly started."

It took two full cylinders, ten shots, for Daisy to succeed in hitting her target. The billet second from the left wavered, teetered, and tumbled off the rail. Mike yelled in delight. "You did it! Aunt Daisy, you did it, you really did it!"

"She sure done, Tiger," Jess agreed. "No, ma'am, don't cock it again—lemme get that piece of wood and see how you hit it." He jogged rapidly across the yard, clambered through the rails and gathered up the fallen target, turning it in his hands, nodding thoughtfully. Then he put his hand on the topmost rail and boosted himself over, striding back to rejoin his pupil. "You didn't hit 'er square," he said, "but for a first score you done good. See here? You can see the white inside part of the wood where the bullet gouged a furrow. Looks like you went a little too high and left. You wanta work on that. Might be it's you, might be it's the gun—each one shoots a little different, some low, some offside, and I ain't used this one myself, so I can't say for certain." With a solicitous look: "You wanta try again, or is your hand hurtin'? Any job you ain't used to is like to fetch on cramps and such at first."

"If I could stretch it a little…"

"Sure," he said, and took the Paterson out of her grasp. "I'm gonna try shootin' her myself, see if I can get a feel for how she takes aim. Flex your hand some, and your wrist too, like you was tryin' to play a guitar; that'll loosen 'em up some." He balanced the Paterson in his grip, getting himself accustomed to the unfamiliar weight, unaware of the slightly grim expression Daisy and Mike could see settling into place on his face as old reflexes and training cut in. Then he extended his arm, letting the pistol hang down at his side, and brought it up, smooth and fast, bracing his elbow against his short ribs to hold it level, cocking and triggering in a steady stutter of fire. Four billets leaped, somersaulting off the rail, one after another.

"Wow!" said Mike.

"Well," Jess decided, "it ain't the gun. Shoots pretty straight for somethin' so old. Them New Haven fellers always did make a good piece, considerin' they kinda had to start from scratch and experiment a good bit. You game to try again, ma'am?"

Daisy took a deep breath. "Yes, but—what time is it? We'll have to stop well before the noon coach is due, and you and Mike will want something to eat too…"

He fished his old silver watch out of his vest, popped the cover and glanced at the face. "Ain't but only fourteen after nine, ma'am. Got plenty of time yet."

She looked a bit doubtful. "I'm afraid I'm costing Slim a lot of money, wasting so many of my shots."

"Don't you trouble yourself on it, ma'am," Jess told her. "Thirty-six caliber don't go but a dollar twenty for a hundred rounds, that's way less'n what we spend on ours—forty-five runs a cent and a half, two and a half a round, and I can reload your brass, that'll cut it some. Look at it the way we do. It's our investment in you, like it was for Slim to pay to have your truck freighted up from Denver. It's part of gettin' you settled in here." His wide mouth softened. "We'd sooner you'd stay, y'know. So we don't mind if it takes a spell for you to get used to things. Happens t'anybody that comes out here fresh. No different for you than most, and better'n some. Now," he said briskly, "let's get back to work."

**SR**

Telford Frayne had heard the gunfire well before he reached the turnoff to Sherman Ranch. He checked, listening. One gun only, from the sound, and a pistol, probably. Maybe Harper was practicing. It took regular daily exercise to keep your hand in, and a man with Harper's reputation might be more interested in doing so than many others—like his boss—might be.

He thought for a minute or two, then turned to the left and continued east till he came to the junction of the Old Laramie Road, moving down it. The gunfire was muffled here, blocked away from him by the bulk of the ridge thrusting out from the mountainside, but it kept on, with occasional pauses as the gun was reloaded.

He crossed the stage road just above the bend and urged his horses into the trees, working his way slowly up the slope. The gunfire had stopped by the time he found a place that suited him, with a gap in the foliage that would allow him to look straight down on the ranch yard. He tied the bay and the roan, took his field glasses off the saddlehorn, and moved cautiously forward—not that he thought Harper would be likely to look up spontaneously; Western men, with their broad-brimmed hats, tended to bend their gaze on the level, but in Frayne's business a man didn't stay alive by taking unnecessary chances.

By the time he bellied down in the soft pine duff at the edge of the trees and got the glasses comfortably situated, Harper was setting up fresh targets on the top rail of the corral. There was a white-blonde woman and a small boy watching, the same two he'd seen at the store on Saturday afternoon; the housekeeper, by what he'd heard in town, and an orphan the two men had gotten guardianship of, a month or so back.

Harper walked back to a point about twenty-five feet from the fence, checking to make sure the boy was well out of his line of fire. Through the glasses Frayne could make out his face, lean and still and cold. Then the spark jumped in his eyes, his hand flashed down, and his Colt whipped up and emptied itself in a thunderous sustained roar. The assorted targets lined up on the fence rail leaped, somersaulted, spun. He didn't miss, not once.

Silence fell, and then after a moment Harper relaxed and began fitting fresh cartridges into his weapon, his head turning toward the woman as if to listen to some comment she was making. He took a watch out of his vest, consulted it, nodded. Dropping one hand to the boy's shoulder and lightly grasping the woman's arm just above the elbow, he turned toward the house, and they crossed the yard together and disappeared through a door at the left-hand end of the building.

Frayne lowered the glasses, rolled over onto his side and got his own watch out. A little before eleven. There were four stages through here each day, as he'd learned by way of a casual call at the line office in town; he'd had to guess at when they arrived at the ranch, since the schedule board showed only departures from terminal towns and arrival at major stations like Medicine Bow or Casper. That was part of why he'd wanted to do a scout before he made his move. There was a lot about this situation that was outside his usual experience, and he figured he was going to have to assure himself that whoever was left behind—maybe Sherman—wouldn't be able to go after him, or send for help, till he was too far off for it to do any good. But then, Sherman wouldn't be bound by county or Territorial lines like that sheriff in Laramie, and from what he'd picked up, the man had taken some pretty long trips to help the Texan, at various times over the last couple of years.

He hoped he wasn't going to have to kill the rancher, or even wound him badly. Frayne might be a bounty hunter, but he had his code, and he didn't enjoy going against it. He never saw the good in killing any man the law didn't have a noose waiting for, and while Harper might be wanted, Sherman wasn't. Besides, killing honest citizens was how you got men like himself chasing after you.

Frayne was thirty, an average-sized man with the easy unassuming grace of one brought up to the saddle—he'd been born in Amherst County, Virginia, north of Lynchburg—and the fair coloring often found in the South, sandy hair, a dragoon mustache that matched, and clear green eyes. He wore a fawn-gray hat, blue-checked flannel shirt under a faded leather jacket with small tassels on the sleeves, black whipcord pants tucked into stovepipe boots; his one vanity was his spurs, which had silver frames, gold chains, and heavily engraved rowels as big as silver dollars. He carried two guns on view—one in an open-toed swivel holster on his right, the other high in front of his left hip, the butt angled sharply right for a cross-draw—and a clip holster strapped to his chest below his left armpit, besides a foot-long Bowie knife down the shaft of his right boot. There was a Winchester sheathed on his saddle, and his pack horse carried, among various other tools of his trade, a Ballard .45-70 single-shot buffalo gun whose Government ammunition could kill at 600 yards, three times the range of the commoner .44-40.

By what he'd learned in Laramie, since he pulled in just under a week ago, this was one of the oddest situations a bounty had ever led him into. He'd been hearing rumors for at least a year that Jess Harper had settled down somewhere in Wyoming, given up his old trade and turned honest, but it hadn't had much relevance for him until he'd come across an old wanted poster from Prescott, Arizona, dated November, 1869, and offering $1500 for the man's apprehension, on a charge of accessory after a murder. That wasn't a hanging offense—twenty years' hard time, usually, twice what it was for accessory beforehand—but the price was good: five thousand was considered a very large reward, and many were only a tenth as much. Worth his time, especially since he'd been in Fort Collins when he picked it up, only sixty-five miles from Laramie, a long day's haul on a good horse.

He'd been cautious at first. Ordinarily he followed the mannerly custom of calling on the local law, showing his papers, mentioning the rewards on his man—not necessarily his name—and offering to cut the officer in for ten per cent, putting him down as assisting officer in his reports. Most of them would be nice about it, not slinging you into jail on principle, looking the other way and forgetting your name in case the man you were after had friends or relatives who were likely to get bothersome. But the rumors Frayne had heard these last couple of years had been just enough to make him think that a little advance intelligence-gathering would be worth his time, and it had. Harper was here, he'd found that out almost at once: had been for more than two years, and was well known in the area, even using his right name—which naturally meant the sheriff knew him by it. Most sheriffs weren't paid terribly well, though they frequently acted as tax assessors, collectors, or both, and took a cut of the money from that; so there was no reason for them not to pick a man up if he was in their jurisdiction and they knew he was wanted somewhere, most of all if he came with a reward attached. And given that the jurisdiction issuing the want was more than 900 miles away by the quickest route Frayne knew—much farther than he really wanted to haul a man with Harper's reputation, alive, dead, or anywhere in between—he needed to get the local law on his side, so he could lodge his prisoner in the jail and wait till he could get a letter down to the marshal who'd signed the dodger. It cost, on average, a bit over two dollars per day to fill a jail bed, and usually if Frayne offered to pay three until he heard back, the local law would go along, on the principle that it wasn't costing the taxpayers anything. It would be a big chunk of money—there was no telegraph to Prescott yet, and even by stage his letter would take close to a month to get there and fetch an answer, assuming that this Marshal Jim Tenney was in his office when it got there; but still, ninety dollars from fifteen hundred wasn't that bad. There'd be living expenses, of course, but those were part of the deal whether he had a bounty coming or not.

Maybe, Frayne had begun to think, that accessory beef wasn't the only serious charge that could be laid at Harper's door, just the only one anybody could tie him to with any degree of certainty. After all, a man who'd accessorize to murder would do other things. Maybe whatever it was had gotten the man some money, and he'd cut Corey in for a share of it to leave him in peace. Not all sheriffs were as honest as they might be, and the fact that Corey had a good rep might just mean that he'd been better than most at concealing his slip-ups. In any case, given what had been described to him as a friendly relationship between the lawman and the Texan, Frayne had realized he couldn't realistically expect any help from Corey. On the other hand, just about forty-five miles south of Sherman Ranch was the Colorado line, south of which Corey would have no authority. So Frayne figured his best bet would be to take Harper there and put him on ice in Collins, on the same terms as he would have offered Corey had he felt sure of the man.

Still, this was going to take some planning. It wasn't only the possibility of Sherman taking a hand; it was that the ranch was a relay stop for the stages. Two outbound from Laramie, one he reckoned about nine in the morning, the other at half-past three, and two inbound, noon and five o'clock. Being a contractor for the line, Sherman would be able to send messages in by the drivers even if Frayne were to drive off all his horses and leave him afoot. The nine A.M. one wouldn't be much help to him—he'd be incommunicado till the first inbound came through—but Frayne didn't want to chance meeting it on the road; if Harper worked at Sherman's, he'd be known to the drivers and guards, and they might take offense at seeing him manacled and on his way to parts unknown. No, he'd be better off to get Harper out early, like around sunrise; that way they'd be over the Territorial line before ten, snug as bugs in a rug. But that meant he'd have to move in the evening before. Like tonight.

It would have been easier in some ways if Harper had been indicted by the Grand Jury and his poster had read Dead or Alive. If he'd shown fight in that case—or even if he hadn't—Frayne would have been within his rights to kill him, and then he'd only have had to furnish proof of the man's decease to the marshal in Prescott in order to collect his money; he'd still have had a wait, but he wouldn't have needed to go to such a lot of trouble. But Frayne took some pride in being a bit more ethical than many men in his line of work. He didn't kill except if the bounty tried to kill him first. And if Harper had settled down here, he wasn't likely to do that. It was a long way to Prescott, Arizona, and probably the man had figured he wasn't likely to be found. If a wanted man could stay out of the jurisdiction issuing the poster for seven years, as long as it wasn't a capital crime (which Harper's wasn't), the case couldn't be prosecuted; the want would have to be dropped. That would be what Harper was counting on.

It wasn't that Frayne didn't sympathize with the man's desire to stay out of prison—or to go straight, if that was what he was doing. But that wasn't the point. The point was that Harper was wanted, and Frayne could find just as many good uses for $1500 as any other man.

He wasn't too worried about the woman or the kid; they wouldn't be likely to have much show against him. Sherman was the one who had him bothered—and Harper, of course: the man's reputation had him as being pretty good, and having just seen him at practice Frayne could believe it.

Well, he couldn't make his move for a few hours yet. Meanwhile he'd stay up here and keep an eye, and see if Sherman showed himself. Maybe he could think of a way to put the rancher out of action for a while. Take him along too, just for a few miles, and leave him in the woods somewhere, shackled and gagged; it would take any searchers a day or more to find him, and by that time—provided Frayne stuck to the main roads, which would hide his sign—he could be over the Line and Sherman wouldn't have a clue which way to go to find his friend.

Or maybe something else would come to him before it was time to make his move. A bounty hunter had to cultivate patience. Frayne could wait; Harper didn't seem to be going anywhere.

**SR**

"Now watch what I do, ma'am," said Jess. "It ain't hard—nowheres near as tricky as if we'd left her cap-and-ball. Ain't enough you know how to fire your gun; you got to know how to load and clean it too."

Daisy watched carefully as his black-gloved hands moved deftly, fitting fresh shells into the cylinder, then giving the loading gate a soft tap to close it. "Yes, I see. It seems quite simple. But—" with a glance down the table at the watching boy— "is it really safe to leave it like that? Here in the house, I mean, with Mike around?"

Jess grinned. "You ain't forgot what I told you last week, have you, ma'am? Mike's a country boy—and he's spent a good chunk of his life on the trail besides. Reckon he's had guns around as far back as he can recollect, long ones anyhow—ain't you, Tiger?"

"You bet, Jess," Mike agreed. "When we were just about to start west, my pa got a rifle—to hunt big game with, he said, like deer and antelope—and set up targets, like you did, and let me watch while he shot at 'em. And then he took his old shotgun and blew Jehosaphat out of a pillow. I wasn't five yet, but I ain't forgot it. I know guns are dangerous, Aunt Daisy," he added, giving the woman a wise look.

"Hold in mind, ma'am," Jess added, "Slim and me keep our sixguns loaded all the time, even when they're hangin' on the pegs by the door—and Slim's a lot more level-headed than me, I reckon you noticed by now. Same with the rifles and the shotgun. When you need a gun, out here, you _need_ it—you ain't always got the time it takes to shove in a full load. I been a lot of places since I… left home, and I don't recollect ever hearin' of no kid shootin' himself or anybody else by accident—not even a greenhorn kid on a wagon train. That's likely on account that it takes 'em a spell to be able to hold a long gun straight—it's the balance, y'see—and handguns are worse. 'Cept for derringers—and folks that own one of those gener'ly keep it right on 'em all the time, not layin' around the house—most of 'em weigh at least as much as this'n does, and they're pretty near all single-action too, gotta be cocked by hand, like I showed you. Most boys' hands ain't big enough to hold and cock a full-size gun till they get to be eleven, twelve, somewheres in there. _Mine_ wasn't, and I was bigger all around than Mike is, even at his age."

"I suppose you know best," Daisy admitted. "You said it would be possible to hide it in case of trouble. What do you think would be a good place?"

Jess gave the question the consideration it deserved. "If you can find a metal box to put it in, to keep the damp out," he offered after a moment, "you could tuck it away down cellar somewheres. Or you could put it behind somethin' in the dresser cupboard—that's a good dark spot, somebody lookin' casual might not notice it. Or under your bed. There's plenty of places, even in a little house like this. My old gun—the one I used to carry when I was workin'—it's hid in a kind of hole in the chimneystack. Took me by surprise the day Slim showed it to me, I can tell you."

"I'll think about it," Daisy promised. "Hadn't you and Mike better go out and get the team ready? The coach should be coming along soon, shouldn't it?"

Jess checked his watch against the battered green alarm clock—it had been Jonesy's in his trail-cook days—on the shelf behind the stove. "It should. C'mon, Tiger, let's go earn our pay."

**SR**

Frayne checked his watch as the red-painted Concord came roaring down the slope and into the yard. Just about noon, as he'd figured. That meant he'd probably been right about the other stages' arrival times. All the same, he'd hold back and wait till the last one had been…

**SR**

After the noon stage had left and Jess had tended to the used team and turned them out in the home pasture, he went inside to eat dinner with Mike and Daisy. Since none of them had been doing physically demanding work, the woman had served a light midday dinner of beef pot-pie—basically a meal in itself—and on the side dried green beans simmered with bits of ham, stewed tomatoes, and freshly baked cornbread to mop the juices up with. There was an applesauce cake, topped with fresh whipped cream, for dessert. "You want to go on any, Miss Daisy?" Jess asked as he went after the last crumbs of his.

"I don't think I ought to," she replied. "I've got the ironing to do. Do you think I did well, Jess?"

"Not so bad, for a beginner," Jess told her. "Them last couple of cylinders you was hittin' at least as many targets as you missed, even movin' back a foot or so every so often, to get your eye used to the longer range." They'd worked their way back to a dozen feet from the corral before he'd stopped to show them what he could do. "You'll get better, it takes practice, like anythin' but beginner's luck. But it don't do to keep at it too long, not when you're still new to it. You go 'head with your chores and I'll keep Mike out of your way till suppertime. I'm thinkin' I'll do some work with that sorrel of his before I start in on any of them youngsters of Slim's."

"Ember?" Mike asked. "What are you gonna do with Ember, Jess?"

"Put him on the snaffle again, sack him a little, maybe see if he'll take that old McClellan saddle Slim's got in the barn, the one he rode in the war; it's lighter'n a stock saddle, so it's a good thing to start a young horse on. You wanta come help me? He's your horse."

"Sure!" Mike agreed eagerly.

So, with the meal finished and Daisy busy with the dishes, the man and the boy headed out to the yard. Jess knew that the team horses for the next change, which knew the schedule almost as well as the humans did, would be wandering down to the gate around three o'clock; he didn't have to go after them— good draft horses, which stage horses half were, often liked to work and were quite placid and friendly, likely to co-operate when the time came to put them to it, and at worst they'd have to be enticed within reach by a bucket with a little grain in it. As for Ember, he was already staying in the barn, thinking about yesterday's lessons: Jess had been working with him most of this last week, getting a feel for his character and how much he already knew, introducing him to the light snaffle bit with its straight-line, jointed mouthpiece; like most plains cowhands, Jess broke his broncs with that, or a loose hackamore with _fiador_ , and as soon as the pony was a little bridle-wise the light one-piece curb was put in and he started working cattle.

Like all kids, Mike was naturally curious, and the fact that it was his horse being worked guaranteed that he would want to know what Jess was doing and why. Jess brought Ember out of the barn and led him around some with just the halter to loosen him up, then put the bridle on and set Mike on the top rail of the corral before leading the sorrel into it. Ember had already learned that he couldn't fight a bridle, or else he just wasn't of the temperament to try, which given that he was a Missouri fox-trotter rather than a range mustang wasn't surprising.

"Every man that works horses has his own way of goin' at it," Jess explained to the boy. "Me, if I can, I favor the easiest, slowest way I can. You'll see a lot of men who'll just rope a green bronc, throw him and blindfold him, sling a saddle on him, climb on, and ride him till he gives up—or kills 'em. But that ain't the right way. A workin' horse needs to learn not to be afraid of a man, needs to know to trust him so's they can do their job as a team, whether it's workin' cows or huntin' buffalo or fightin'. Indians, now, they know that, and they know how to take their time, 'cause they got plenty of it. And yet I've seen kids your size ridin' double on a bareback colt when the village moves, and it don't try to pitch 'em off neither. Or them Arabs that lives 'way th'other side of the ocean and owns camels—Slim's read me about them; they're patient in their trainin' too. And both of 'em ride mares to war, which most white men won't do. That kinda tells you somethin' about how good their way works; the way we do, we figure mares mostly for skittish troublemakers, not dependable or smart enough to make into workin' ponies, not good for nothin' but ladies' mounts and buggy-pullin'. So, if you got the time, it's better to work up to it slow, over the whole three-four years before your horse is old enough to start doin' his job, whether it's cows or stages or what. It's like when you go to school. I ain't been, but even I know they don't plop you down at a desk and figure on you readin' the whole Bible, or doin' ranch books like you've seen Slim do, first rattle out of the box. They start you off with simple, easy things and fetch you along gradual-like over time. _That's_ the way to do with a horse."

Mike thought this over for a minute. "I reckon I see that," he said. "So how do you start?"

"First, when he's still just a little feller runnin' with his ma, four months old or thereabouts, you handle him, put a little halter on him, tug him around the corral a few times till he gets the idea that you're stronger, which you are, right then," Jess explained. "He won't forget that; horses've got good memories. When comes weanin' time, you run him through the halter business again, just to remind him, brush him and groom him, comb and pull his mane and tail, lift and handle his legs and feet to train him for shoein'. You turn him loose till he's a yearlin', but you let him see you now and then, ridin' around wherever he's pastured, and if you got time you handle him frequent—catch him, lead him, brush him, check his feet, pull his tail; it don't hurt him, horses ain't got nerves at the roots of their hair like human folks. Comes his birthday, you give him a refresher course about the halter and teach him to mind a rope and not be afraid of the sound it makes, and again before he turns two—colts most of all; you don't want 'em goin' loco when you go to rope 'em out to be gelded. After he heals up, you do it again, sack him out, put the saddle on him a few times; his back's strong enough now to bear it, though he might not be up to a rider yet if he's mustang-blooded—they ain't ready for range work till they're four. You lead him around on foot or from another horse till he gets used to the weight of it, the way the stirrups swing and squeak, the way the leather creaks. A horse bucks or fights 'cause he's scared, Tiger, 'cause somethin's happenin' that he don't understand, or that he thinks is gonna hurt him. You give him a chance to get used to them things, to see that they don't hurt and ain't gonna kill him, and he'll hold that in mind. Then when he's three you do what I'm doin'—sack him out again, put a snaffle on him, saddle him, and if he's Eastern-bred, like Ember, try ridin' him. Somebody's already give him a start, back before your pa got him; that's why he ain't been makin' a fuss about the halter, settin' back on the line or nothin'."

"If that's the right way to do it," said Mike thoughtfully, "how come everybody doesn't? How come Slim doesn't?"

Jess sighed. "'Cause Slim's got him a bunch of beef that ain't nowheres near as smart as horses, and they take more lookin' after, and there's more of 'em to think about. Any man that's been on the drives, like me, knows you got to know cows and be suspicious of 'em, they can't be trusted for three seconds together. But you've heard of 'horse sense,' I reckon; horses're smarter all 'round than cows, which is likely one reason we don't eat them and ride the cows." He chuckled at Mike's giggle. "And that makes 'em easier to raise, besides not so likely to bob up and down in their sellin' price the way beef does. If this here was just a horse spread, not a cattle ranch, we'd be runnin' maybe three, four stud bunches, eighty, ninety, a hundred-twenty mares plus their increase. We'd fetch in one bunch of colts at a time, work 'em for thirty-forty days, turn 'em loose to rest and think about what they'd just been through, and take on another. After we'd run each bunch through first lessons, we'd start workin' 'em by turns again, ten-fifteen days to the bunch, then put 'em in bridle and hackamore for two-three days, then the bridle alone, and let 'em start trailin' cows in a round pen. It'd be pretty much full-time work for six, seven months, but we'd get 'em broke the slow easy way, without sourin' 'em or teachin' 'em fear. Back on Wind Vane where I was fetched up, we had a man done pretty much nothin' but that, year in and year out—Jack Henry Milburn, his name was; he was the one that taught me. He'd take 'em up to the bridle-and-hackamore stage, then cut 'em into the strings of the riders on the crew, and they'd pretty much teach themselves the work. Come the winter he'd take 'em out again, long enough to teach 'em about a curb, and time they was five they'd have a good start to bein' cowponies."

Mike pondered this for a little while. "How many cattle has Slim got?" he asked.

"Eight hundred and some, goin' by what we worked at roundup. Hundred-sixty or so is steers, different ages, close to three hundred's she-stuff, and the rest is calves, yearlin's, and bulls."

"If we had just horses," Mike went on, "how many would we have, with all of 'em?"

"We likely wouldn't sell none of the young'uns till they was four and full broke," said Jess. "So for every mare we'd have four-five young that wasn't nursin', and one that was—maybe some less, allowin' for losses and mares that don't catch."

"Five hundred, maybe six," Mike decided, after a couple of minutes' struggle with mental arithmetic, "but we wouldn't have to work all of 'em every year, would we?"

"No, horses pretty much look after their own selves," Jess agreed. "You get a good herd stud, he stays out on the range with his mares all year round and protects 'em, and even the geldings and fillies've mostly all growed up together, so they can work together to fight off wolves and such. It'd just be the young'uns each year, and the threes and fours'd be the ones that'd make the most work."

Mike nodded. "I see. You're right. It'd be lots less to do. We should tell Slim we want to raise horses instead of cattle."

 _Wisht we could,_ Jess thought but didn't say. When he was a kid, he'd dreamed of raising horses, breaking them slow and gentle the way Jack Henry did it, getting a name for the good blood he'd have and how easy it would be to work with them. The Bannisters had put an end to that. "Take a lot of land, though," was what he said aloud. "Horses trample as much grass as they eat, maybe more; most of it comes back over time, but you got to have at least twice as much ground for the same number of 'em as you would with cattle. Means we'd need at least half again what we got now, for as many head as I talked about. And then there's hay, and maybe oats too. Back before you come here, Slim used to fret somethin' awful about the mortgage he had on the place, till we got it paid off. Gonna be a spell 'fore he's ready to sink money into maybe buyin' more land, and gettin' more mares and good studs wouldn't be cheap neither."

He'd been "sacking" Ember as he spoke—patting and whacking him with an old gunnysack with a rope tied to one end to drag it back by, waving it around him, putting it on his back, rubbing his legs and back with it, dragging it under him, tossing it around his legs and over his back, rubbing it all over his body, slapping legs and rump and finally head, proceeding with each part only as the horse tolerated the last, letting him remember that it didn't hurt, no matter how scary it might look. He paused now and looked at the attentive boy. "You wanta try gettin' on him? Just with a blanket and a surcingle, but I reckon he'll take you—you don't hardly weigh no more'n a saddle, just by yourself." The next to last time they'd been to town, Slim had put Mike on the grain scale at the feed store, and he'd come up at just fifty-five pounds.

"Sure!" Mike agreed.

**SR**

After they'd seen the last of the day's stages off, Jess did the milking and the barn chores, sent Mike in to see if Daisy needed any help with supper, and then sat down on the porch with the Paterson and gave it a quick but thorough cleaning. Daisy had found a lidded steel roasting pan, ten by fifteen inches, that would suit well as a receptacle for the pistol; he had just fitted it when she came out. "Mike's feeding his pets," she said. "Supper should be ready in about another half hour."

"Don't seem like it took you too long," he observed mildly.

"It's Irish stew," she explained. "I thought I'd be most of the day at the ironing, so I put it on right after breakfast. It didn't take long to make up a batch of baking-powder biscuits—I just now left them in the oven." She gave a hitch to her skirts and settled in the other chair. "Is that—er, my gun?"

"In the box? Yes, ma'am. You take her in and hide her wherever when you go back to dish out."

"I do hope I won't have to use it," she said with a sigh. "You understand that, don't you, Jess?"

"Ain't nobody got a right kind of mind _wants_ to use a gun," said Jess. "But like I said before, sometimes you ain't got a lot of choice. This is wild country, ma'am, with a lot of wild critters and some wilder men, and you can't ever be sure you won't run into one, which is why most men that spend their time in the open pack iron."

"I suppose," she observed thoughtfully, "that every society has good reason for developing whatever methods it has to cope with its surroundings. I think I understand now, for instance, why Western men wear broad-brimmed hats—the sun is so strong! But I do wonder… what is the reason for those high-heeled boots? I've never seen any man back East wearing anything like them."

"Well, like you say, ma'am, there's a why for everythin'," Jess replied. "Suppose you're ropin' on foot, say you're dealin' with a bunch of green horses that ain't learned yet to mind a noose—high heels let you dig into the ground of the corral you're in. Give you surer footing in 'most any kind of ground work, come to that. Main reason, though, is that one thing most range men are bad scared of is havin' a foot hang up in your stirrup and get you dragged by your horse. With that high heel, it can't go through." He grinned. "They make a pleasin' sound when you're walkin' on town boardwalks, too, and pop out a pretty rhythm on a dance floor."

She laughed softly. "Vanity!"

"Yes ma'am," he said, ducking his head.

She sobered then, and was silent a moment, as if pondering whether to go on. "I'm not sure just how to put this," she said, "and by your Western standards it may be terribly rude—but I've begun to know you better now, and even after what happened in Jubilee, I can't see you as a—a killer. It's not that I'm not sure you've killed men before, but—Jess, are you proud of having been what you were?"

"A gun for hire, you mean? Funny, Slim's said somethin' kinda like that. He always says I ain't no stone killer, no matter what I get to thinkin' when I'm low in my mind." He was silent for a moment, pondering his reply. "It's a tough question, Miss Daisy. Times I am, and times I ain't. I didn't set out to get in that line; I told you that. Dixie made me see that if I aimed to do the job that'd been laid on me, I had to get good with a gun—better'n Bannister or any of his was likely to be. And that I needed to be able to make better'n cowhand wages, be able to work a week or a month and then take off when I got word of any of 'em, with money enough in my belt to keep me a spell." He stared thoughtfully off across the yard. "I been in pretty serious trouble, more'n once. Got on wanted posters three times—Texas, Arizona, Colorado—though that's all been cleaned up. Was set up and lynched, one time in Laredo. Been in more dust-ups than I can rightly count—got to where a lot of folks that only knew me by my rep looked at me and just saw a dangerous hair-trigger killer. Got to where sometimes I come close to believin' it myself."

A pause, and then: "But I got rules that I don't break, Miss Daisy. I ain't ever shot a man that wasn't heeled and facin' me. Ain't ever stole, or bushwhacked—'cept in the war, when it was survival or I was ordered to—or quit midway of a job 'less I found out the feller I'd been workin' for hadn't been straight with me. Ain't ever cheated at cards 'less somebody else done it first. Ain't ever hurt a woman—" _though there's one time I was sore tempted,_ he admitted privately, as the memory of Laurel DeWalt briefly surfaced— "or a kid, or a horse 'less I had to put it down. Ain't ever killed a game critter but for meat, nor wounded it and left it to die by inches. Ain't ever gone back on my given word, or failed to pay a debt I owed, 'cept one time, and then the feller just wouldn't have it no other way." _Roney'd ought to known I couldn't stand by and watch him kill Miss Essie…_ "Twisted the truth a few times, but never without what seemed like good cause, and never took no joy in it. Never took no joy in killin' a man, neither—there ain't only one man I ever _wanted_ to kill, and I reckon you know who that was. What's more, I know my skill's been valuable to folks that needed it. Slim, Mort, folks I've worked for, like the time I got mixed up in the Monarch Freight dispute, down Denton County. I ain't boastin', y'understand, but there's a good plenty of good folks livin' that wouldn't be if I hadn't been around to take their part."

"Jess! Aunt Daisy!" Mike came pelting around from the side yard. "There's a rider comin' down the side of the ridge!"

The Texan stood up. "So there is. Miss Daisy, you best go set another place at the table."

"Yes," she agreed, "I remember, that very first evening I was here, Slim told me that if anyone happens by at mealtime, they expect as of right to be invited to join us. Give me the box, Jess, and I'll put it away while I'm there. Come with me, Mike."

He passed it into her hands and stepped off the porch, moving out into the yard. The sun was at his back, and it wouldn't set till around half-past seven, a good hour and a half or more from now, so there was still enough light for him to see something of the incoming rider. A stranger to him, he decided; average-sized, fair in coloring, sandy hair, a dragoon mustache that matched, and clear green eyes. He wore a fawn-gray hat, blue-checked flannel shirt under a faded leather jacket with small tassels on the sleeves, black whipcord pants tucked into stovepipe boots, and fancy spurs with silver frames, gold chains, and heavily engraved rowels as big as silver dollars. He carried two guns on view—one in an open-toed swivel holster (Jess couldn't see the open toe, but the lack of a tiedown suggested it was there) on his right, the other high in front of his left hip, the butt angled sharply right for a cross-draw. Jess frowned briefly—it wasn't that he hadn't seen a fair number of two-gun men, but they weren't common, and when you did encounter one, the odds were he'd be a professional of some kind.

The stranger had seen him too; he checked his horse—a mahogany bay with two white socks in front—and the packhorse trailing it, a dappled roan with white mane and tail, slowed too. With the sun shining directly at him, Jess could see his face clearly; it wasn't one he recognized. "'Evening," he said.

Jess dipped his head courteously. "Howdy. Get down and water. We'll be puttin' supper on the table pretty quick, if you care to stay."

"That's real generous of you," said the other; Jess recognized the accent—upper South, maybe Virginia, which he'd heard a good deal of when he was in the war. He carefully turned his bay so its left side was toward Jess and swung gracefully out of the saddle. "What place might this be?"

"Sherman Ranch," Jess told him. "Most folks that pass through here are aimin' for Laramie; it's about another twelve miles that way," and he nodded toward the divide at the far side of the little valley in which the ranch buildings lay cradled.

"Seems to me I've heard that name," said the other. "You'd be the owner, then? Slim Sherman?"

"No," Jess shook his head, "Slim's my boss. He's up north a ways—ain't lookin' to see him for a couple weeks or so."

"That so?" the stranger responded, almost thoughtfully. Then: "That's real fortunate—for both of us, maybe." And that quickly, his right-hand gun was out of the holster and pointed at Jess's belt buckle.

For a moment Jess was too stunned to react at all. He'd taken his gun off for dinner and hadn't bothered to buckle it on again—he hadn't figured he'd be needing it for working with Ember—and the other's action caught him unarmed and flat-footed. _Dang, Harper,_ he told himself then, _you're gettin' too careless to live._ "What's that for?" he demanded.

"You're Jess Harper, am I right?" was the reply.

"Yeah, what of it?"

"What's of it is that you're wanted in Prescott, Arizona, and I can get $1500 for you," the other told him.

Jess turned his head and spat. "Bounty hunter. Might've known. You're ridin' for a fall, Mister. I know the want you're talkin' about, and all them posters was s'posed to've been called in two years ago. The man that signed 'em—Marshal Jim Tenney—I satisfied him that I hadn't done it."

"You got anything to prove that?"

"Didn't reckon on needin' it, least of all after so much time," Jess admitted. "But you ask Sheriff Mort Corey in Laramie. He knows the whole story."

The stranger snorted. "I'll bet. Just because you've got the local law in your pocket doesn't mean a thing to me, Harper, except that I've got to get you out of the Territory to file my claim. Who's in the house, if Sherman's not home?"

"Our housekeeper," said Jess slowly, "and a kid named Mike—Judge Henry made him our legal ward, a month or so back."

The hunter glanced quickly past his shoulder, toward the lights glowing in the kitchen windows. Jess knew as well as he figured the other must that Daisy and Mike wouldn't be able to make out exterior details with that to dazzle them; they wouldn't have seen the gun. "Let's go in the barn, Harper. Nice and easy, like you're helping me put my horses up."

Jess knew better than to argue or take long chances when somebody had him under a gun. He grunted assent and walked past the stranger, in through the open door of the barn; he could hear the gentle crunch of the other's boots on the packed earth of the yard as he turned to keep Jess covered, then followed him in, the horses' steps a slow clip-clop-clip almost covering his own.

Inside, the hunter directed Jess to light a lantern, then closed the doors and dropped the inner bar. Having secured himself against surprises from the rear, he moved around his captive in a wide cautious circle, then backed slowly up the centerway, checking each stall as he passed it. The only horse resident was Ember; at this season they usually let the stage horses stay in the home pasture, feeding and watering them there once they were stripped and rubbed down and their feet checked, and since Jess hadn't had any plans to go anywhere today, he'd left Traveller there too. "Not your horse," the man noted thoughtfully. "I saw you working him in the corral."

"No, not mine," Jess agreed. "Belongs to Mike. Ain't but three years old."

"Where _is_ yours?"

"Pasture," said Jess, with a nod in the appropriate direction. "He'll come down of his own accord later on, maybe—he knows I'm like to have a treat for him before I turn in."

"That's good," the hunter decided. "I won't have to send the boy after him and risk that he'll take off to get help for you. Now," he said, "move over toward that stall with the old chair in front of it and sit down. I've got some shackles on my packhorse. I want to make sure you're good and secure before we go any further."

"What about supper?" Jess retorted.

"Somebody'll come looking for us when we don't go inside for it," the other guessed. "And in case you wonder, my name's Frayne—Telford Frayne."

Jess drew a slow breath and let it out again. "Heard of you. At least you ain't no killer like some of your kind. All right."

Frayne was efficient. He chained Jess's hands in front of him with a pair of the new handcuffs that had been introduced during the war, with the adjustable ratchets that ensured a snug, secure fit for any thickness of wrist, clinching them down firmly. He shackled the Texan's ankles to the stretchers and legs of the chair in which he or Slim often sat to check and repair the harness, then passed a length of chain around his waist and wove it in and out of the uprights of the backrest so he couldn't slip himself free. That done, he led his bay and roan into two of the vacant stalls, took a couple more lengths of chain out of the latter's load, and quickly fastened the side and corral doors shut from inside.

The front door thumped, then rattled as someone tried to open it. "Jess?" came Mike's voice from outside. "Jess, why don't the door open? Aunt Daisy says she's gonna dish out—aren't you coming?"

"Answer him, Harper," said Frayne, his voice silky.

Jess thought fast. "You go tell her I need to talk to her, Tiger, and fetch her back here, okay?"

On the other side of the door, Mike hesitated, then said dubiously, "Okay, Jess."

Jess looked at Frayne. "You better not be meanin' to do 'em no harm, Mister," he growled. "If you do, it ain't just me you'll have to worry about. It's Slim, and Mort Corey, and a good chunk of Albany County besides."

Frayne snorted. "I don't operate that way, Harper. You said you'd heard of me. I've got no reason or desire to harm a woman or a kid. This is just you and me. But we'll have to stay holed up in here overnight. I don't want to try to take you through country you know better than I do, not in the dark and not after I've already been up all day."

"You said you was meanin' to get me out of the Territory, not have nothin' to do with Mort in town," Jess remembered. "Prescott's a long ride from here."

"Much too long for me to want to try to get you there in person and alone," Frayne agreed. "Not a man with your rep. No, we're only going over the line to Colorado. I'll get you tucked away in the jail in Fort Collins and send a letter down to Tenney to let him know where to send the reward."

"Already told you there ain't none," Jess reminded him. "And it's gonna take a good spell for you to hear back, even if he's in his office when your message gets there."

Frayne shrugged. "I know that. Patience is a virtue, Harper, especially in my line."

 _I can't leave Mike and Daisy here all alone,_ Jess thought, _not with the stages and all, and Slim away, and not even Ben to help 'em! If he'd take me through Laramie I could at least leave word with Mort, have him send somebody out, maybe get a telegram off to—where'll Slim and Reed and Celie be, about now?_ He thought frantically. _What am I gonna do? If he's aimin' to put me in charge of the Fort Collins law… they don't know us down there, they might not let me send a message._

 _Dang, there's gotta be some way out of this-!_

Someone tried the door. "Jess?" came Daisy's voice. "Jess, are you hurt?"

Frayne drew his sixgun again and gestured with the barrel. "Answer her, Harper," he said, too softly to be heard through the thick planks.

"No, ma'am," said Jess clearly, "no, I ain't hurt… we just kinda got a—a situation here." To Frayne: "Let her in so's I can make her understand."

The hunter considered a moment. "All right." He left the lantern where it would cast a circle of light on Jess's shackled form, walked down the centerway and lifted the bar, then backed quickly away. "Come in, ma'am, but easy."

The door swung open slowly; Daisy had realized this was a strange voice, and new to the West though she was, she'd already seen enough to be cautious. She stepped across the threshold, one hand behind her, probably holding Mike back, her eyes searching the scene before her. When she caught sight of Jess—and the chains—she gasped and stopped short. "Jess! What's happened?"

The Texan nodded toward Frayne. "Like I said, ma'am, we got a situation. This feller here's a bounty hunter—like that _hombre_ that was after Deever. He's lookin' to claim an old reward that was put out on me—I told you I'd been on a poster out of Arizona, you recollect?"

"But—you said that had been cleared up!" Daisy protested.

"It was, but _he_ don't believe that," said Jess. "The price ain't dead or alive, and I don't reckon he'll kill me—but he could sure do somethin' to make me hurt, if you don't do what he tells you."

Daisy half spun to face Frayne, indignation plain on her face. "I don't know who you are, sir," she said sharply, "but I advise you very strongly to put that gun away and let Jess go! He told me he wasn't wanted, and he doesn't lie."

"Telford Frayne, ma'am," the hunter replied evenly, touching his hatbrim politely, "and _you_ may think that, but it doesn't make it so. Just about every man I've ever brought in has claimed he didn't do whatever it was. Now—I'm not taking any chances on any food you offer me, but Harper might appreciate the supper he was looking forward to."

Daisy hesitated, looking from him to Jess and back again. "Yes," she said slowly after a moment, "I imagine he might. Come, Mike," she said, reaching around for the boy, who by now was peering wide-eyed around her hip.

Frayne dropped the bar firmly behind her.

**SR**

 _What shall I do?_ Daisy asked herself. _He has a gun, and Jess doesn't. He said he wouldn't take chances on my food… if I thought otherwise I could try to slip some laudanum into his coffee…_

"Aunt Daisy?" came Mike's small, uneasy voice. "What are we gonna do? We can't let that man take Jess to—to—"

"To Arizona," Daisy supplied. "Be still, Mike, and let me think. Come help me get supper for Jess."

No one had ever thought to explain to her exactly how bounty hunters operated, so she had very little information to work with. If Jess was wanted—or _had been_ wanted—in Arizona, that seemed to suggest that the man would have to take him there, and Arizona was a long way from Wyoming; exactly how far Daisy wasn't sure, but certainly many days' ride.

 _Does Sheriff Corey know anything about this?_ she wondered. _Should I try to get word to him? But how can I? All the horses are in the pasture, except for Ember in the barn, and it's getting dark. I can't ask Mike to_ _walk_ _that far at night, and I certainly can't leave him here and try to do it myself._

In the kitchen, she had Mike hold a plate while she ladled out a generous portion of stew, then added green string beans flavored with mustard, spiced Persian melon, two hot biscuits, some yellow tomato preserves and sour-sweet chokecherry jelly. She poured coffee, sugared it as she knew Jess preferred, got a tray out and put plate and cup on it, added a slice of lemon pie and a portion of blueberry cobbler on separate saucers, two forks and a spoon—she was sure the stranger wouldn't permit a knife—and then firmly ordered the boy to wait for her on the kitchen steps while she carried the food out to the barn. When she identified herself, the bar slid back and she was able to enter. Jess watched as she came down the centerway, a sad, haunted look in his blue eyes. "Miss Daisy… I'm sorry—I never reckoned on this happenin'…"

"I know you didn't, dear." She set the tray on his knees, taking the opportunity to notice how securely he had been shackled; there'd be no getting him free without the keys, and Frayne doubtless kept those on his person. "Now eat your supper. You must keep up your strength."

"You won't be able to send word into town till the noon stage comes through," said Jess. "He'll likely have me long gone by then. He said he's—"

Frayne's sixgun cocked. "That's enough, Harper. I don't need you sharing where I plan to take you. All right, ma'am, he's got his food. You can go back to the house now."

She gave him a look that should at least have left him with a severe headache, if nothing else. "Very well," she said stiffly, "but let me warn you that if he comes to any harm, Slim Sherman will make it his business to see that you pay for it to the full extent of the law."

"He'll have to get here first," Frayne replied calmly, "and Harper told me he's not due back for two weeks."

 _He'll certainly come sooner, if I can get a message to him,_ Daisy thought as she crossed the yard to the house and the waiting Mike. _Dear me, I wish I'd thought to ask him to leave me a copy of his itinerary. Who would know it? Mrs. McCaskey, I imagine._

"Aunt Daisy? What are we gonna do?" the boy demanded.

She remembered that Slim had taken him along to the McCaskey ranch last week; she wasn't familiar with the place herself, but he would be. "How far is it to Mr. McCaskey's house, Mike?"

"It's five miles by the stage road till you get to their turnoff," he said slowly. "Slim showed it to me before you came here. But the way we went, over the range, it's only three." Guessing her thought: "His foreman'll be there, and some of his crew, and Joe—that's his oldest son, he's eighteen."

"But it will be getting dark soon," she said. "You can't walk that far at night. You might get lost, or fall and hurt yourself." Forestalling his expected insistence to the contrary, she added: "Jess needs his strength, and we need ours. Come, let's have our supper."

**SR**

Frayne had found the old metal burner Jonesy used to brew his homemade liniment on, and a little scrap lumber in one corner of the barn, enough to make a small fire and heat up a can of coffee. He opened some beans, poured them into a deep plate and warmed those too. It wasn't much of a supper, but in his business he was probably used to getting by on short rations from time to time. He didn't seem to be at all envious of the good meal Daisy had left; probably he figured that the more Jess had in his stomach, the less likely he was to try to make a break, since most men with a full belly would tend to be more or less logy and slow-moving. Not that there was much chance of Jess getting loose of the shackles, of course.

When they'd both eaten, Frayne drew some water from the tank in the spare stall, gave his cup and plate a lick and a promise and put them away. Then he said, "Unbuckle your spurs, Harper."

"My spurs?" Jess repeated. "Why?"

"Because I'm the man with the gun," Frayne reminded him. "And because I mean to put you and your horse in between me and my packhorse, and I don't want you getting any ideas about digging them in and trying to break loose of us."

Jess scowled at him. "Think of everything, don't you?"

"I try," Frayne agreed lightly, and his gun barrel angled to bear on his captive. "Now unbuckle 'em."

Jess sincerely doubted that Frayne would kill him; he didn't have that name, and even if he had, with Daisy and Mike within earshot, he'd have to either leave in a big hurry (and without Jess's remains to collect on), or come up with a satisfactory explanation of himself, to them and to Mort Corey and—eventually—Slim. But he might wound the younger man painfully, and that would limit Jess's ability to help himself out of this spot. Despite his infamous hot temper, Jess could be very logical and capable of careful planning if the situation required it. He realized that he had to make Frayne think he'd accepted his fate, and maybe the man would go off his guard. All Jess would need would be a minute or two, given the right set of circumstances, and he'd turn the tables on the hunter before Frayne knew what was happening. He put a sullen look on his face and leaned as far forward as the chain around his middle would permit. He was just about able to reach the buckles of his spur straps and clumsily free them.

 _Maybe if I can get him talkin', that'll help some,_ he thought. _Ain't much chance of it—he's a pro, the same as me—but I gotta try._ "You know, Frayne," he began slowly, "you ain't hardly the first bounty hunter I've crossed paths with over the years—there was one here not more'n a month ago. I can kinda see how just about anybody could do what they liked with a man that was wanted either way, but I ain't—you know that yourself. So how is it you can just do me like this?"

Frayne tilted his head, a look of interest in his eyes. "I think you're the first wanted man who ever asked me that. Well, I don't suppose there's any reason not to tell you. First of all, the laws about jurisdiction and calling on a man to surrender and such are meant to protect citizens from the government, and its officers at various levels—town police, county sheriffs, Federal marshals, the Army. Not from each other. I'm a private citizen, and I've got a right to make a citizen's arrest of anyone I have reasonable cause to believe has committed a felony, even if they didn't do it in my presence. Second, since there's a reward standing on you, you're legally defined as being in a state of perpetual escape, same as you'd be if you were out on bail. It's not all that different from what would happen if I was walking along the street and you took that moment to break jail; I'd have a right to stop you, and use deadly force if you didn't stop."

Jess listened, frowning. "How come you know so much about it?"

Frayne shrugged. "I was reading law, back a few years. Couldn't go back to it after the war, but what I learned gave me some legal backing. Most lawmen don't know all the ins and outs, but judges tend to respect a man who can argue his case on a statutory basis—which means according to the law books—and if I do get hauled in, which happens occasionally, all I have to do is cite citizen's arrest. I've never had any further trouble, after that."

The Texan pondered this new information. "So," he said thoughtfully, "you're just a lone hand?"

Unexpectedly, the hunter smiled. "Yes and no. I've got backup of a kind. I carry a license as a bonded private detective in Kansas. It's not hard to do; all I had to do was get a lawyer to set me up an incorporated investigations agency—like the Pinkertons—and then post a performance bond, slip the judge a couple of hundred for expediting matters, get a mailing address, and satisfy the State Attorney-General that I know the law and what I'm doing… which, as you've guessed, I do. That got me papers to show a coroner's jury, if the question ever comes up, and if I'd wanted to I could even have bought a mail-order badge, which is sometimes a help; people tend to think that a badge means you're doing something proper instead of just being a busybody, though it has no meaning in law. I don't have to show my credentials often, but there are places where having them is an advantage—Texas, for instance, is a bit muleheaded about free-lance lawmen, but nobody arrests you if you can prove you're working for a bonded agency, even if you're the full extent of its personnel, which I am, not that they ever bother to check. I can make an arrest anywhere I please, without regard to extradition laws, because, as I mentioned earlier, I've got no boss or voters to answer to, and no legal restraints on where I can act. It's the best of two worlds, you might say."

"Yeah," Jess agreed softly, "I reckon it is."

**SR**

The woman Harper had called Daisy came back for her tray and dishes after about an hour. Frayne inquired about Harper's horse, and she agreed that the animal had a habit of coming down to the pasture gate in the evening, if it hadn't been used that day, and usually getting a treat for its trouble. He handed her a halter to put on it when it did, and told her to bring it back to the barn. She looked as if she wanted to tell him where to get off, but she restrained herself, and half an hour or so later she returned, leading a light bay horse with a white star and a Texas brand. He took custody of it, chained the front door shut behind her as he had the others, and put the animal in a stall, supplying it with food and water so it would be fit for a day's ride tomorrow. With the doors, and Harper, secured, he figured he could sleep the night through soundly and safely, which would be a help with a long journey ahead of him.

He wondered where Sherman had gone and why, though he was relieved that the man wasn't around. Not only was he unconnected to the bounty, he was in effect an innocent bystander—quite possibly he wasn't even aware of the want—and Frayne made it an article of faith not to kill people who weren't wanted. That sometimes made his job harder, though he'd never come across a situation quite like the present one. He hadn't looked forward to having to do anything final that would have taken Sherman out of play, but he'd known the possibility might arise. As Harper had guessed, he was a lone hand; most bounty hunters were, not because they had any inflated notions of their own ability, but as a practical matter. Captures could be few and far between, and in the interim a man still had his living expenses. Moreover, unlike a drifting cowhand, a bounty hunter needed to spend a good deal of his time in towns, because that was where he was likeliest to learn about new rewards or pick up word regarding any fugitive he might currently be interested in; and living in town took money. So the less people he had to share his rewards with, the better.

The private-detective dodge had been the most attractive of the avenues he might have taken to keep himself from getting arrested by every small-town lawman he ran into, though he could also have gotten commissioned as a Deputy U.S. Marshal; being a Federal officer, he wouldn't have been restricted by state or Territorial boundaries, and he wouldn't have had to concentrate solely on Federal offenses, either: a marshal could take an interest in any serious crime, such as bank robbery, or rustling, or the murder of a civilian—and being the only kind of officer who didn't have any limits on where he could go or act (as long as he did it on American soil), he wasn't bound by the confusing pattern of jurisdictions that often forced sheriffs and other lawmen to stop when they hit the limit of their territories. Technically a deputy marshal was only supposed to make arrests on Federal land—that was why they were the only white law that could operate in the Nations—but because so much of the West was exactly that, judges tended not to quibble over the question, especially when the arrestee was wanted for something important. As for the fugitives themselves, most knew very little of the law and couldn't afford to hire attorneys; the ones appointed for them by the courts were likely to be either young and inexperienced or getting old and tired and maybe too fond of the bottle, and in either case interested chiefly in the $500 fee they'd get out of county funds for their trouble.

Still, a deputy's commission was liable to revocation for cause, or if the Presidency changed hands (or rather parties), and in any case Frayne preferred working for himself, without any command structure to answer to, even in theory. As an attorney, he'd have been his own boss, and he saw no reason not to follow a method that allowed him to do likewise.

He thought about that woman in the house. She seemed fiercely protective, and he'd bet there was a rifle or two inside. Maybe he ought to go in while she was still awake and make her give them up. But then, by what he'd heard, she was new in this country, fresh out of the East not more than a month or so ago. In any case, he could always use Harper as a shield, force her to let him go his way.

On the other hand, although she wouldn't be able to send word into Laramie till the noon coach tomorrow, that didn't mean she—or more likely the boy—couldn't ride there as soon as he was out of sight; they'd know the country better than he did. He'd have to turn the horses out—the stage teams too—before he got ready to leave. The sun would come up around four-thirty, but the sky would begin lightening a couple of hours before that. Twelve miles to Laramie, twenty-five from there to the Territorial line—though he'd want to make a circle around the town, not go straight down the main street—if he kept to a trot he'd make it in about four hours. Which meant that if he pulled out as soon as he could see, he'd be over the line with his prisoner before even the first stage—which wouldn't do Harper's housemates any good—pulled into the yard…

**SR**

Mike was reluctant to go to bed with one of his hero-guardians away and the other in trouble, but he was a well-brought-up boy and finally gave way to Daisy's insistence. "Will you wake me, Aunt Daisy? Let me say goodbye to Jess?" was all he asked.

"Yes, Mike, I'll wake you. Cross my heart," and she crisscrossed the bodice of her brown-and-white calico dress with her forefinger to bind the promise.

When he was tucked away, she went back into the sitting room and stood for several minutes beside the door, gazing through the glass pane at the black shape of the barn. _There must be something we—I—can do_ , she told herself.

It never entered her mind that Frayne might have legitimate cause to take Jess away. Jess had admitted that he'd once been in trouble in Arizona, but he'd said it was cleared up. Why would he even say so much, if he had reason to think the trouble might follow him here? Hadn't he said that he'd "twisted the truth a few times, but never took no joy in it"? No, this was some terrible mistake. Even if she let Frayne take Jess, certainly it would all be cleared up eventually…

Or maybe not.

Before Deever and Sally left for Laramie, last week, she'd gotten quite friendly with them, and she remembered something the man had said. _"I'm grateful to Harper for standin' up for me, killin' that no-good that was huntin' me. There's a lot too many men in that line that don't bother to bring their captures in alive. They see to it that a man comes down with a case of lead in the back—or even the front; some of 'em are good enough that they give him a chance at a gun and shoot him down when he takes it. They bring the body in to the nearest law and say the fella got hold of a weapon, and who's gonna dispute it? Especially if it's a dead-or-alive want…"_

Jess had said his want wasn't, but did that necessarily mean that Frayne would let him live? Arizona was a long way to ride with a man who was angry at being brought to book for something he claimed had been cleared up, a man who was keenly conscious of the obligations he had to his absent friend and to the woman and boy and ranch that had been left in his charge. A man who had lived ten years taking what had probably been many risks and long chances for less cause.

She wondered what crime Jess was accused of. It didn't seem likely that it was murder; that was a capital offense, almost certainly the kind of want Deever had mentioned. But then why was there a reward at all?

Was it possible Jess had deceived her? He'd said he'd "never shot a man that wasn't heeled and facin' him." He'd killed, probably many times. But she didn't—she couldn't—believe he was a murderer. No murderer could be as gentle with a young boy as Jess was, as shy with a woman. No murderer could ever have earned the trust and friendship—the brotherhood—of a man like Slim Sherman.

What did he risk, if Frayne got him back to Arizona? Prison? To a man like Jess, that would be worse than dying. A noose? Surely not, but even that…

No. She couldn't let it happen. If Slim had been here, able to go after them, or even to seek some legal remedy for his friend's situation, that would have been different. But he wasn't here. It was only Mike and herself.

It occurred to her that Frayne must think her rather ineffectual; he hadn't even come in and demanded that she give up any guns she might have access to, as Jess had warned her a man might do who visited with bad intent. Could she turn that to advantage? If he thought so little of her abilities, he might lower his guard when he brought Jess out…

But then, Jess himself would probably be shackled, as he'd been when she'd spoken to him before; he wouldn't be able to get out of the line of fire. And while Jess had spoken approvingly of her performance with the Paterson, she'd never so much as held a long gun in her entire sixty-five years. She'd be fortunate if she didn't kill him in trying to help him.

What then? Mike couldn't go to Laramie, or even the McCaskeys', on foot… could he ride there? She'd looked out the window at least a dozen times, checking up on him, after Jess put him on Ember's back, with a blanket between him and the sorrel's hide, held in place by a leather strap. He'd shown the boy how to tuck his knees under the strap to make his seat more secure, led Ember around and around the pen half a dozen times until he was sure the horse wasn't going to buck, and then tied a long rope to the halter and stood in the middle of the corral and let Mike urge Ember into his natural fox-trotting gait, then into a canter, and finally, briefly, a flying gallop. Mike had kept his seat throughout the exercise, laughing and shouting with glee as the wind of the sorrel's passage tugged at his shirt and ruffled his hair, unafraid and joyous, while Jess, in the middle, turned steadily with them, the line held firmly in his hand and a lariat in the other, ready to throw a loop and check the horse if anything seemed in a way to go wrong. Daisy had been surprised at how at home Mike had seemed on something almost a man's height off the ground, how completely sure of himself and his mount.

But that had been in the corral—a controlled situation, with Jess there in case of trouble. Out on the range, or on the road, that wouldn't be true. Something might frighten the sorrel, he might take that curbless snaffle bit in his teeth and run away with Mike, or throw him off.

No, she couldn't risk that. She knew Mike would be willing to try it, for Jess's sake, but she had, after all, been hired in large part to look after him—and if Jess wasn't here, that put the entire responsibility for the boy's welfare in her hands.

No, it would have to be up to her… somehow.

If there were an outside ladder to the barn loft, maybe she or Mike could get up there and drop something on Frayne's head, or slip Jess a gun... but there wasn't, and Frayne had chained the grade-level doors shut; they wouldn't be able to creep in after he fell asleep.

And yet, Daisy knew, she had to do _something_.

She remembered what she'd said to Slim, that very first evening she was here, after he'd explained something of who and what Jess had been and how he'd come here. _"…T_ _aking such a load on your shoulders, all alone, with all the responsibilities you must have, as a rancher and a relay operator… you should have someone to share that with. How you've managed not to be netted by some perceptive young woman—either of you—before now I can't imagine!"_

She wanted that, wanted to see it. Either one of them would make such a good husband and father. When he took Troy into his office as a junior partner, Lloyd had changed his will, stipulated that their son should inherit the house and the firm upon his father's death, although Daisy herself would have life tenure in the former if she survived her husband. The two of them had talked more than once of how, when Troy married, they would insist that—being their only living child—he bring his bride to his boyhood home, as a young Chinese man would do in similar circumstances. That way they could move into the downstairs bedroom and help the young couple raise their children. She had dreamed of it often.

And then Troy was gone, and the dreams with him, until she found this place and these men and their boy. Jess, somehow, most importantly.

She _knew_ Jess, somehow—ever since last Monday when he'd told her about Texas and Dixie Howard and his family, she'd known him better than she had ever known anyone except Lloyd and Troy and her own siblings. She knew he'd told the truth about this want. She couldn't let…

…one of her new sons…

…be taken away by a man who might very well kill him for convenience as soon as he got out of earshot.

She looked toward the kitchen. There was only one option.

Spelled P-A-T-E-R-S-O-N.

She turned abruptly away from the door, stiffening her spine, and marched into the other room before she could have second thoughts. Kneeling in front of the big old country dresser, she opened the bottom cupboard door and felt in the shadows for the roasting pan.

 _So light,_ she thought, looking at the gun as it lay in her hand, _to be able to take a man's life._

Then she recalled what Jess had said. _"A .44 slug can knock a man down if it takes him when he ain't ready for it, though if he's mad and comin' at you it can take a good three rounds to put him down, sometimes more. This here, like I said, it ain't got the powder load, so it don't hit so hard."_

That meant she would have to get close, too close to miss, but not close enough that he would be able to grab her arm, or bat the weapon out of her hand. She would have to make sure he didn't know it was there until it was too late for him to charge at her, afoot or a-horse.

And then hope that God would give her the strength to do what she had to, to save Jess… send the bullet true, if it came to shooting, and forgive her afterward.

**SR**

Mike woke with a start as gunshots banged somewhere out in the yard and hooves thundered on the packed earth. The bunkroom was still dark, but he could make out the position of the windows by the barely graying sky beyond them.

His first terrified thought was that that man out in the barn had killed Jess. But then he realized that the hoofbeats he heard were far too many for even three horses, the hunter's two and Traveller. He scrambled out of his bunk and raced into the sitting room. The front door was open, letting a chilly dawn breeze in, and Aunt Daisy was out on the porch in her mull robe, hugging it around her and looking out over the rail. As Mike came up alongside her and stopped, he made out a large dark blot diminishing in the distance, heading for the Stone Creek ford, and heard whinnying and squealing. Horses. He looked automatically straight across to the pasture gate; it was hanging open, and a roan horse with a white mane and tail and a man on its back was standing in the middle of the yard, the rider gazing after the retreating herd. A rifle was braced against his hip, the muzzle pointed skyward.

He held his horse there for a few minutes, then turned and walked it easily over to a point about ten feet from the watching duo. "Sorry I had to turn out your stock, ma'am," he said, "but I figured it was safer for everybody concerned if I didn't leave you in a place to ride for help once my back's turned. I'll be taking Harper now, soon as I can get a saddle on his horse."

"Can't you at least wait until I can make some coffee?" Daisy demanded. "Jess is never quite himself without it. And it's chilly, and he doesn't have his jacket."

"If he's a little bit cold, ma'am, that's all the better for me," Frayne observed. "A cold man can't move as fast as a warm one. I won't have to be quite as careful of him till the sun gets well up and soaks into his muscles."

Daisy looked down at Mike. "Let us say goodbye to him, then. Please. And give Mike time to get dressed."

Frayne considered that. "All right, but if you're not out in the yard when I'm ready to go, I'm leaving."

"We'll be there," Daisy promised, and shooed Mike inside.

**SR**

Jess had known he should get as much rest as possible, but being manacled to a chair all night didn't make for a very comfortable night's sleep, and he was drowsy and only half-conscious when Frayne began unwinding the chains that held him there. "Come on, Harper, on your feet, we're going."

The Texan made one last try. "Look, Frayne, you're gonna put yourself to a lot of trouble and a long wait for nothin'. Your time's your own, but you know I'll try to get away from you first chance I get, and even Fort Collins is a good long day's ride from here. Take me to Laramie. I'll give Mort my parole and come back here, look after the place till he can get word down to Jim Tenney. You can even come back with me and stay, save yourself hotel and meal costs in town and board for your horses. I done a lot of things in my life I ain't proud of, but I never went back on my word, and if you know my rep like you seem to, you know that's so."

Frayne snorted. _"You_ might keep your word, but I've got my doubts about that housekeeper of yours. The way she looked at me last night, she'd probably put arsenic in my coffee first chance she got."

Somehow Jess doubted that Daisy would be quite that cold-blooded, but he realized that Frayne was in no mood to be convinced. Slowly, his muscles stiff and cramped, he pushed awkwardly erect, grabbing at the nearby wall of the stall to support himself.

**SR**

Daisy and Mike were waiting in the yard when Frayne rode the roan out through the barn doors, with Traveller roped to his mount by a line passed through the handgrip hole just below the horns of the two saddles, no bridle on him, and his bay, which was carrying the pack, tied on behind Traveller in turn. Mike was still tousled with sleep, as well he might be—Jess, with an outdoorsman's familiarity with sun cycles, figured it was no later than five o'clock. An hour and a half to breakfast-time. _Don't look like I'll be gettin' any,_ he thought.

Frayne had hung Jess's spurs over his saddlehorn by their straps. He lifted them off it and tossed them overhand toward Mike, who, in the automatic way of all small boys, shot his hands up to catch them. "Here you go, kid. A little souvenir of your friend here."

Jess shivered in the chill of early morning; even in July, at this altitude, the night temperatures routinely got down to the high forties, and with the sun just beginning to show, the air hadn't had time to warm up. Dazed with sleep, cold and stiff and much in need of caffeine, he scarcely noticed Daisy slip her hand under her robe—until he heard the sharp familiar click of a gun being cocked.

"Stop right there, Mr. Frayne," Daisy ordered, bringing the old Paterson up in both hands. "You are not riding out of this yard with Jess."

Suddenly wide awake, Jess looked from the woman to the hunter, trying to gauge the latter's reaction. He couldn't make out more of Frayne's face than the curve of his jaw and cheek, couldn't see the man's expression, but the way he'd drawn himself stiffly up in the saddle was enough, for an experienced man, to show that he'd never expected this. _If she'd come out here with the shotgun,_ Jess told himself, _he'd likely been just as surprised, but maybe he'd be able to recover faster._ He tugged ineffectually at the chain that linked his wrist manacles; Frayne had threaded it through the handgrip hole, locking him to the hull so he couldn't hurl himself off into the brush somewhere along the road.

Frayne perhaps recognized the shape of the old gun for what it was, and in the poor light couldn't make out the noses of the bullets in the cylinder; he seemed to think it was still in its original cap-and-ball condition and might, therefore, chainfire. "Put that thing down, lady, you want to hurt yourself?" he demanded.

She didn't move, and the resolve on her face didn't change. "I am not letting you leave here with my boy," she said flatly.

That seemed to disconcert Frayne even more. "Yours? How's he yours? You're not his ma. You just work here."

Her lips tightened briefly. "I don't propose to discuss it with you. Now, very carefully, unbuckle your gunbelt and let it drop, and then get out of your saddle."

"And if I don't?" There was a faint hint of amusement under the words; Frayne was recovering his self-possession. Jess tugged again at his manacles, knowing it would do no good but unable not to try. Maybe if he could attract Frayne's attention to himself—

Something moved at the corner of his eye, and he realized that Frayne, distracted by Daisy and the Paterson, hadn't seen Mike slip away from her side. The boy was circling toward the barn door, whether on his own or on previous orders from Daisy Jess couldn't guess.

"If you don't," said Daisy, "whatever happens to you will be entirely on your own head. I've given you three warnings, Mr. Frayne. That should be more than enough, even by your Western codes."

He laughed softly. "Maybe so, but I don't think you have the stomach to do anything about it. Now I'm riding out and Harper's coming with me, so you'd better step out of my way."

Daisy didn't move, and the Paterson didn't waver. Jess tried to calculate where the bullet would go if she missed—was he in danger from it?

Frayne gave his roan a nudge, and Traveller slowly moved in his wake.

And Daisy squeezed the trigger.

The sharp report seemed to echo from the house to the mountainside and back. The roan horse shot straight up off the ground, squealing in pain. It probably would have started bucking, but Traveller—who had been trained for roping—assumed that the line linking him to it meant that he should hold it, and he squatted back hard. The roan went down in a thrashing heap, and Frayne, taken by surprise, didn't have time to kick free of the stirrups. Trav pulled back, as he would have done if the roan had been a steer, and Jess tightened his legs against the bay's barrel and clamped his hands over the horn.

A flash of movement, and Mike was there with a pitchfork from the barn in his hands. He jabbed down, two tines straddling Frayne's right wrist, pinning his hand, preventing any attempt at a draw. He leaned his full weight into the handle of the fork, effectively immobilizing the hunter even as his horse kicked and struggled, fighting against the rope that connected it to Traveller.

Daisy ran forward, one of Jonesy's butcher knives in her left hand, and cut the lead rope with a single slashing motion. The roan almost fell back on top of its master, then scrambled awkwardly to its feet. There was a bloody gash in its right shoulder, and Jess realized that the bullet had plowed along the line of the muscle without lodging; Frayne had been lucky it hadn't gone on to take him in the gut. Maybe it had hit the gullet of the hunter's saddle and lodged in the tree, or maybe it had ricocheted off the horn stem.

"Gimme your keys!" Mike ordered, his voice a little shrill.

Daisy backed away a few steps and pulled the hammer back for a second shot. "Do it, Mr. Frayne, or next time I won't aim at your horse."

Stunned and shaken, his dominant hand pinned, Frayne slowly slipped his left into his jacket and brought it out with a ring of small keys. Mike snatched it and tossed it to Daisy, who missed it, but pounced on it when it hit the ground. A moment later she was at Jess's side, unlocking the cuffs. He slid to the ground, throwing an arm around her shoulders, gently extracting the Paterson from her grip and training it on Frayne. "Okay," he said coldly, "boot's on th'other foot now, Frayne. Like Daisy told you before, unbuckle your gunbelt with your left hand, nice and easy. You keep him pinned, Tiger, you're doin' fine."

It took Frayne a bit of struggling to get the belt out from under his own weight, but he was professional enough to know that he had no choice. Jess yanked him to his feet as Mike pulled the pitchfork free, shoved him across the yard to the barn, pushed him up against it and searched him, finding first the clip holster and then the knife, since looking for a knife in a man's boot came naturally to him. Mike, without having to be told, fetched another set of manacles from the bay packhorse. In short order Jess had Frayne secured in the barn, even more uncomfortably than he'd been himself, his arms pulled up over his head and fastened to one of the uprights that defined the outboard end of each stall. With a kind of savage satisfaction, he backed away from his former captor, taking the Paterson off cock and sliding it through his belt. "Now," he growled, "see how you like havin' a taste of your own medicine, Frayne. Soon as the noon stage comes through we'll be shippin' you into town to Mort Corey. I reckon he can think up a whole bunch of charges to file against you."

Mike flung his arms around Jess's waist. "Are you okay, Jess? Did he hurt you?"

"Naw, Tiger, I'm fine, just need some breakfast—and coffee." He tipped his head down, looking at the woman still enfolded in the crook of his left arm. "You done real good, Daisy. I'm right proud of you—both of you." He drew them both into his embrace, hugging them to him with an almost savage relief.

"I couldn't think of anything else to do," Daisy admitted shakily, "especially after he turned out all the horses."

"Don't reckon they'll go too far," Jess observed. "Ours'll be expectin' their mornin' grain, and the stage teams know the schedule near as well as we do. I got Trav, I'll get after 'em while you fix me somethin' t'eat. Was you aimin' for the horse, or the man?" he asked curiously then.

And that was when Daisy fainted dead away.

**SR**

 **On the porch, Sherman Ranch, three weeks later, about 8:30 P.M.:**

Slim shook his head with an air of combined resignation and astonishment. "I had a feeling you'd get in trouble the minute I wasn't here," he told his best friend. "But from the way you tell it, Daisy handled it better than I'd ever have expected—especially after only one morning's worth of shooting lessons."

"Kinda thought the same myself," Jess admitted. "I still ain't sure which she was aimin' to hit, Frayne or the horse. Fact is, I ain't sure _she_ is."

"Then why'd she faint?" Slim wondered.

Jess pondered the question for a minute. "Maybe, once she had a chance to think about it, she saw that the way that slug went, it could'a' killed Frayne easy as not. Or maybe she was surprised she even done that good, seein' as she was only hittin' the target once out of every two tries when we quit for dinner that day. Or maybe she was hopin' she could get away with bluffin' him, not havin' to shoot at all." He shrugged. "I ain't asked and I don't aim to, and you better not either, hardcase."

"No," Slim agreed, "I don't have any such intention." Then he smiled. "But I think she's earned herself a spot in the family, don't you?"

Jess grinned. "You bet she has." He chuckled. "I reckon Frayne won't underestimate no woman again. She must'a' scared the horse apples out've him. Made him a believer, at least about her." Then: "You ain't said—how'd you do with your campaignin'?"

His friend shrugged. "Nobody threw anything at me, from rotten tomatoes to lead, so I guess that's a good sign. Reed seems to think most of the people I talked with were favorably impressed, and Celie kept grinning like a Cheshire cat every time he asked her what the women thought. By the way, speaking of throwing lead—what did Mort do with Frayne?"

"Slung him in jail and booked him for trespass, carryin' a concealed weapon, threat and menace, unlawful removal of stock from its customary range, false imprisonment, and attempted kidnappin'," said Jess. "Ain't been able to haul him up before the judge yet—still waitin' on hearin' back from Tenney, though he reckons that'll come in another week or so. When he wrote he asked for a paper I can carry to prove that old want ain't good no more. Reckon whatever lawman Frayne got the poster from ain't th'only one don't clean out his files as often as he should."

Slim nodded. "Makes good sense. All you need is one that's notarized and signed by the man issuing the poster; that should discourage any more like him."

The door latch clicked, and both men scrambled to their feet, one from the homemade chair, the other from the rail on which he perched sidewise, his dominant right leg straight down, gunfighter-fashion, as long habit bade, even though his Colt was hanging on the rack inside. "Oh, heavens," said Daisy, "sit down, both of you, it's only me." She smiled, and her eyes twinkled. "After all, I'm part of the family, aren't I?"

The two men looked at each other in bewilderment. "How'd you know?" Slim asked, regaining his self-possession first.

She settled down in the other chair. "I think," she said slowly, "that shooting at a man—or a horse being ridden by a man, if that man means to harm someone you care about, or even _might_ harm them—could be considered a kind of baptism, don't you?"

Predictably, it was Jess, who had earned his living by just such acts, who was first to reply. "I reckon so. You done a lot better'n I'd ever figured on, Daisy."

"What happened to 'Miss' Daisy?" Slim demanded.

Jess's mouth turned up in a half grin. "Ain't no need for it now. 'Miss' is for ladies you ain't easy with. Like you said, she's one of us."

Slim thought that over. "She is," he agreed. Then, addressing her directly: "Are you sure you're all right with it, Daisy? If I'd been here, instead of out on the campaign trail…"

"If you'd been here," she said, "you'd have tried to fight for Jess too. But Mr. Frayne might not have hesitated to shoot _you_. I thought—I hoped—that he might be so surprised to see a woman aiming a pistol at him that he wouldn't be able to decide what to do about it." She sighed. "I wish he hadn't made me pull the trigger, and I hope it never happens again. But if it does…" She trailed off and shrugged. "If it does, I'll deal with it when the time comes." She looked toward the mountain, still wearing the scraps of its winter snowcap. "I see now what you tried to make me understand that first night, Slim. It's a hard land out here."

"No, the land is beautiful," said Slim. "It's some of the people that are hard. It's a wild, rugged land, and till it settles down there'll be some rough, hard people. Some will just be that way because it takes tough people to tame a new land, but some will be rogues or worse, and some, like Frayne, will be too convinced they're right to listen to any suggestion to the contrary, and some of us will have to make a stand against them. Jess and I have determined that our stand is gonna be on the right side. That doesn't take much, Daisy, just courage and a conscience."

"And I know a lady who's got both," Jess added quietly. "Welcome to Wyomin' Territory, Daisy Cooper."

"And to the Sherman family," Slim added. "We've been needing a mother around here for quite a few years."

Daisy blushed becomingly in the light of the tin-reflectored lamp mounted beside the door. "Thank you. I feel honored that you think I'm… suited to the position. I'll do my best to live up to it."

"Which reminds me," said Jess. "Your husband was a Cooper, and so was my ma. You reckon we're in-laws or somethin'?"

"Where was she from, your mother?" Daisy inquired immediately.

He thought. "Born in Lawrenceburg, Tennessee, she told us. Lawrence County. Her folks moved to Texas when she was twelve. They started out—not her folks' generation, but way earlier—in the Virginia Tidewater, then moved up to the Shenandoah Valley, and from there to the Carolina up-country, what they call Orange County now, and then over Boone's Gap into Tennessee."

"No," said Daisy thoughtfully, "no, I doubt it, dear. Lloyd hardly got out of Chester County his entire life, except when his father sent him to Princeton to college. His mother's people came to the Welsh Tract—that's in the eastern part—in 1682, and his father's settled in what's Lancaster County now in 1740. I have relatives scattered from Pennsylvania out to Ohio, but none that I know of south of that."

Jess shrugged. "Just a thought. Don't matter. Family ain't just about blood. It's about choosin'. Nobody knows that better'n me, I reckon."

"The Sioux think so," Slim added. "There's a word in their language— _hunka_ —that means 'chosen' or 'kin-by-choice.' Considering that not one of the four of us is related to any of the rest, I'd say it suits us pretty well."

"I think you're right," said Daisy. "And, do you know—I'm very glad."

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 **Note:** In our reality, the town of Casper wasn't established till some time after old Fort Caspar had been abandoned. But in Slim and Jess's history, as we learn from "The Run to Tumavaca," there were clearly settlers in the vicinity considerably earlier than that, since Arnold DeWalt was a cattleman of some note (and wealth), a point that took time to reach. So I decided to provide some explanation of how that might have happened, based on the fact that many Western towns really did accumulate around the nuclei provided by military posts.

As Jess tells Daisy, the classic hand-crafted, American-made cast-iron skillet (and other related cookware) of before the 1960's was considerably lighter than its modern counterparts: a "number five" (eight-inch) skillet made in 1905 weighed in at about two and a half pounds, roughly 20% less than the thicker (and therefore heavier) Asian and American models of today, which average out at three pounds three ounces. Jess's own Colt would have weighed two pounds five—and it was better balanced.


End file.
